Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

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CONVERSATIONS

WITH
IGOR STRAVINSKY

Conversations

with
Igor Stravinsky

IGOR STRAVINSKY
AND ROBERT CRAFT

1959

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.
GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

Acknowledgments and thanks are due to Madame
de Tinan for permission to reprint letters by Claude
Debussy; to Madame Jacques Riviere for letters by
Jacques Riviere; to Monsieur Edouard Ravel for let-
ters by Maurice Ravel; and to Harold Ober Associ-
ates, Incorporated, and the Dylan Thomas Estate
for letters by Dylan Thomas, copyright © 1953 by
Dylan Thomas.

" ^B^tht

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 59-63/5

COPYRIGHT © I958, 1959 BY IGOR STRAVINSKY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FHIST EDITION

CONTENTS

i. About Composing and Compositions 11

2. About Musicians and Others 37

3. About My Life and Times and Other Arts Q2

4. About Music Today ng
Index 156

"In the Kingdom of the Father there is no drama
but only dialogue, which is disguised monologue."

RUDOLPH KASSNER

CONVERSATIONS

WITH
IGOR STRAVINSKY

1: About Composing
and Compositions

R.C. When did you become aware of your vocation as a

composer?
I.S. I do not remember when and how I first thought of

myself as a composer. All I remember is that these

thoughts started very early in my childhood, long

before any serious musical study.

R.C. The musical idea: when do you recognize it as an
idea?

I.S. When something in my nature is satisfied by some
aspect of an auditive shape. But long before ideas
are born I begin work by relating intervals rhyth-
mically. This exploration of possibilities is always
conducted at the piano. Only after I have established
my melodic or harmonic relationships do I pass to
composition. Composition is a later expansion and
organization of material.

R.C. Is it always clear in your mind from the inception of
the idea what form of composition will develop?
And the idea itself: is it clear what instrumental sound
will produce it?

I.S. You should not suppose that once the musical idea

11

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

is in your mind you will see more or less distinctly
the form your composition may evolve. Nor will the
sound (timbre) always be present. But if the musi-
cal idea is merely a group of notes, a motive coming
suddenly to your mind, it very often comes together
with its sound.

R.C. You say that you are a doer, not a thinker; that com-
posing is not a department of conceptual thinking;
that your nature is to compose music and you com-
pose it naturally, not by acts of thought or will. A
few hours of work on about one third of the days
of the last fifty years have produced a catalogue
which testifies that composing is indeed natural to
you. But how is nature approached?

I.S. When my main theme has been decided I know on
general lines what kind of musical material it will
require. I start to look for this material, sometimes
playing old masters (to put myself in motion), some-
times starting directly to improvise rhythmic units
on a provisional row of notes (which can become a
final row). I thus form my building material.

R.C. When you achieve the music you have been working
to create, are you always sure of it, do you always
instantly recognize it as finished or do you sometimes
have to try it for a greater period of time?

I.S. Usually I recognize my find. But when I am unsure
of it I feel uncomfortable in postponing a solution
and in relying on the future. The future never gives
me the assurance of reality I receive from the present.

R.C. What is theory in musical composition?

I.S. Hindsight. It doesn't exist. There are compositions
from which it is deduced. Or, if this isn't quite true,
it has a by-product existence that is powerless to

12

About Composing and Compositions

create or even to justify. Nevertheless, composition
involves a deep intuition of "theory."

R.C. Do musical ideas occur to you at random times of
the day or night?

LS. Ideas usually occur to me while I am composing,
and only very rarely do they present themselves when
I am away from my work. I am always disturbed if
they come to my ear when my pencil is missing and I
am obliged to keep them in my memory by repeating
to myself their intervals and rhythm. It is very im-
portant to me to remember the pitch of the music
at its first appearance: if I transpose it for some reason
I am in danger of losing the freshness of first con-
tact and I will have difficulty in recapturing its at-
tractiveness. Music has sometimes appeared to me in
dreams, but only on one occasion have I been able
to write it down. This was during the composition of
L'Histoire du Soldat, and I was surprised and happy
with the result. Not only did the music appear to me
but the person performing it was present in the dream
as well. A young gypsy was sitting by the edge of the
road. She had a child on her lap, for whose enter-
tainment she was playing a violin. The motive she
kept repeating used the whole bow or, as we say in
French, avec toute la longueur de Varchet. The child
was very enthusiastic about the music and applauded
it with his little hands. I, too, was very pleased with
it, was especially pleased to be able to remember it,
and I joyfully included this motive in the music of
the Petit Concert,

*

§1111 /!

* r v * ■s—i

13

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

R.C. You often speak of the weight of an interval. What
do you mean?

I.S. I lack words and have no gift for this sort of thing
anyway, but perhaps it will help if I say that when
I compose an interval I am aware of it as an object
(when I think about it in that way at all, that is),
as something outside me, the contrary of an impres-
sion.

Let me tell you about a dream that came to me while
I was composing Threni . . . After working late one
night I retired to bed still troubled by an interval. I
dreamed about this interval. It had become an elastic
substance stretching exactly between the two notes I
had composed, but underneath these notes at either
end was an egg, a large testicular egg. The eggs were
gelatinous to the touch ( I touched them ) and warm,
and they were protected by nests. I woke up knowing
that my interval was right. ( For those who want more
of the dream, it was pink— I often dream in color.
Also, I was so surprised to see the eggs I immediately
understood them to be symbols. Still in the dream,
I went to my library of dictionaries and looked up
"interval," but found only a confusing explanation
which I checked the next morning in reality and
found to be the same. )

R.C. While composing do you ever think of any audience?
Is there such a thing as a problem of communication?

I.S. When I compose something, I cannot conceive that it
should fail to be recognized for what it is, and under-
stood. I use the language of music, and my statement
in my grammar will be clear to the musician who
has followed music up to where my contemporaries
and I have brought it.

14

About Composing and Compositions

R.C. Have you ever thought that music is, as Auden says,
"a virtual image of our experience of living as tem-
poral, with its double aspect of recurrence and be-
coming?"

LS. If music is to me an "image of our experience of
living as temporal" (and however unverifiable, I
suppose it is), my saying so is the result of a re-
flection and as such is independent of music itself.
But this kind of thinking about music is a different
vocation altogether for me: I cannot do anything with
it as a truth, and my mind is a doing one. Auden
means "Western" music or, as he would say, "music as
history"; jazz improvisation is the dissipation of the
time image and, if I understand "recurrence" and
"becoming" their aspect is greatly diminished in
serial music. Auden's "image of our experience of
living as temporal" (which is also an image) is above
music, perhaps, but it does not obstruct or contradict
the purely musical experience. What shocks me how-
ever, is the discovery that many people think below
music. Music is merely something that reminds them
of something else— of landscapes, for example; my
Apollo is always reminding someone of Greece. But
in even the most specific attempts at evocation, what
is meant by being "like" and what are "correspond-
ences?" Who, listening to Liszt's precise and perfect
little Nuages gris, could pretend that "gray clouds"
are a musical cause and effect?

R.C. Do you work with a dialectical conception of form?

Is the word meaningful in musical terms?
LS. Yes to both questions, insofar as the art of dialectics

is, according to the dictionaries, the art of logical

discussion. Musical form is the result of the "logical

discussion" of musical materials.

15

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

R.C.I have often heard you say "an artist must avoid
symmetry but he may construct in parallelisms."
What do you mean?

I.S. The mosaics at Torcello of the Last Judgment are a
good example. Their subject is division— division,
moreover, into two halves suggesting equal halves.
But, in fact, each is the other's complement, not its
equal nor its mirror, and the dividing line itself is not
a perfect perpendicular. On the one side skulls with,
in the sockets, lightning-shaped snakes; and on the
other, Eternal Life (those white figures, I wonder if
Tintoretto didn't know them), are balanced but not
equally balanced. And the sizes and proportions,
movements and rests, darks and lights of the two sides
are always varied.

Mondrians Blue Facade (composition 9, 1914) is a
nearer example of what I mean. It is composed of
elements that tend to symmetry but in fact avoids
symmetry in subtle parallelisms. Whether or not the
suggestion of symmetry is avoidable in the art of
architecture, whether it is natural to architecture, I
do not know. However, painters who paint architec-
tural subject matter and borrow architectural designs
are often guilty of it. And only the master musicians
have managed to avoid it in periods whose architec-
ture has embodied aesthetic idealisms, i.e., when archi-
tecture was symmetry and symmetry was confused
with form itself. Of all the musicians of his age Haydn
was the most aware, I think, that to be perfectly sym-
metrical is to be perfectly dead. We are some of us
still divided by an illusory compulsion towards "clas-
sical" symmetry on the one hand, and by the desire
to compose as purely nonsymmetrically as the Incas,
on the other.

16

About Composing and Compositions

R.C. Do you regard musical form as in some degree mathe-
matical?

I.S. It is, at any rate, far closer to mathematics than to
literature— not perhaps to mathematics itself, but cer-
tainly to something like mathematical thinking and
mathematical relationships. (How misleading are all
literary descriptions of musical form! ) I am not say-
ing that composers think in equations or charts of
numbers, nor are those things more able to symbolize
music. But the way composers think— the way I think
—•is, it seems to me, not very different from mathe-
matical tliinking. I was aware of the similarity of
these two modes while I was still a student; and,
incidentally, mathematics was the subject that most
interested me in school. Musical form is mathematical
because it is ideal, and form is always ideal, whether
it is, as Ortega y Gasset wrote, "an image of memory
or a construction of ours." But though it may be
mathematical, the composer must not seek mathe-
matical formulae.

R.C. You often say that to compose is to solve a problem.

Is it no more than that?
I.S. Seurat said: "Certain critics have done me the honor

to see poetry in what I do, but I paint by my method

with no other thought in mind."

R.C. In your Greek-subject pieces Apollo, Oedipus, Or-
pheus, Persephone, dotted rhythms are of great
importance ( the opening of Apollo; the canonic inter-
lude in Orpheus; the "Underworld" music in Perse-
phone; the Oedipus "Nonne Monstrum" aria ) . Is the
use of these rhythms conscious stylistic reference to
the eighteenth century?

17

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

I.S. Dotted rhythms are characteristic eighteenth-century
rhythms. My uses of them in these and other works
of that period, such as the introduction to my piano
Concerto, are conscious stylistic references. I at-
tempted to build a new music on eighteenth-century
classicism, using the constructive principles of that
classicism (which I cannot define here) and even
evoking it stylistically by such means as dotted
rhythms.

R.C. Valery said, "We can construct in orderly fashion only
by means of conventions. " How do we recognize those
conventions in, say, Webern's songs with clarinet and
guitar?

I.S. We don't. An entirely new principle of order is found
in the Webern songs which in time will be recognized
and conventionalized. But Valery's essentially clas-
sical dicta do not foresee that new conventions can
be created.

R.C. A novelist (Isherwood) once complained to you of
his difficulties in a technical question of narration.
You advised him to find a model. How do you model
in music?

I.S. As I have just described in the case of eighteenth-
century dotted rhythms; I have modeled this con-
ventional rhythmic device so that I could "construct
in orderly fashion."

R.C. Why did you dispense with bar lines in the Diphonas
and Elegias of the Threni?

I.S. The voices are not always in rhythmic unison. There-
fore, any bar lines would cut at least one line arbi-
trarily. There are no strong beats in these canons, in
any case, and the conductor must merely count the
music out as he counts out a motet by Josquin. For

18

About Composing and Compositions

the same reasons I have also written half notes rather
than tied notes over bars. This is perhaps more diffi-
cult to read, but it is a truer notation.

R.C. Did you model your Threni on the Lamentations of
any old master as, for example, you modeled some
dances for Agon from de Lauze's Apologie de la
Danse and from Mer serine's musical examples?

I.S. I had studied Palestrina's complete service and the
Lamentations of Tallis and Byrd but I don't think
there is any "influence" of these masters in my music.

R.C. Why do contemporary composers tend to use smaller
note values for the beat than did nineteenth-century
composers, eighth-note beats instead of quarters, and
sixteenths instead of eighths? Your music contains
many examples of this tendency (the second move-
ment of the Symphony in C, which is in eighth- and
sixteenth-note beats, and the final piece of the Duo
Concertant which is in sixteenth-note beats ) . If you
were to double the note values of this music, rewrite it
in quarters and eighths, how would it affect the
music in your mind? Also, do you always think or see
the note unit as you compose and have you ever re-
written anything in different note values after it was
composed? Your 1943 revision of the Danse Sacrale
from the Sacre du Printemps doubles the values from
sixteenths to eighths; was this done to facilitate read-
ing (does it facilitate reading)? Do you believe the
size of the note has a relation to the character of
the music?

I.S. I don't think you are entirely correct in assuming an
evolution from half- to quarter- to eighth-note pulsa-
tions. Contemporary music has created a much
greater range and variety of tempi and a vastly

19

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

greater rhythmic range, therefore the greater range
and variety of rythmic unit ( see any table of notation
and compare the types of rhythmic unit in use in the
last five centuries with those in use today). We write
fast-tempo music or slow-tempo music in large or
small note values depending on the music. That is my
only explanation.

As a composer I associate a certain kind of music, a
certain tempo of music, with a certain kind of note
unit. I compose directly that way. There is no act of
selection or translation, and the unit of the note and
the tempo appear in my imagination at the same time
as the interval itself. Only rarely, too, have I found
that my original beat unit has led me into notation
difficulties. The Dithyrambe in the Duo Concertant,
however, is one such example.

It is difficult for me to judge whether a work of
mine, translated into larger or smaller note units but
played in the same tempo, would make an aural dif-
ference to me. However, I know that I could not look
at the music in its translated state, for the shape of the
notes as one writes them is the shape of the original
conception itself. (Of course the performer with his
different approach will regard the whole problem of
notation as a matter of choice, but this is wrong.)

I do believe in a relation between the character of
my music and the kind of note unit of the pulsation
and I do not care that this may be undemonstrable—
it is demonstrable to me on the composer's side simply
because I think that way. And conventions have not
worked universally for so long that we may deny that
there is any relation of ear and eye. Who can take from
dictation a passage of contemporary music in 6/4
and tell whether in fact it is not 6/8 or 6/16?

20

About Composing and Compositions

The point of legibility. I did translate my Danse
Sacrale into larger note values to facilitate reading
(of course it is more readable, the reduction in re-
hearsal time proves that). But legibility and larger
note values go together only up to a point. This idea of
fast music in white notes applies only to certain types
of music (the first movement of my Symphony in C,
for example, and the Gloria Patri in Monteverdi's
Laudate Pueri from the Vespers), but this question
cannot be dissociated from the question of bar units
and of the rhythmic construction of the music itself.

Perhaps the present lack of universal conventions
may be interpreted as a blessing; the performer can
only profit from a situation in which he is obliged to
review his prejudices and develop reading versatility.

R.C. Meters. Can the same effect be achieved by means of
accents as by varying the meters? What are bar lines?

LS. To the first question my answer is, up to a point,
yes, but that point is the degree of real regularity in
the music. The bar line is much, much more than a
mere accent, and I don't believe that it can be simu-
lated by an accent, at least not in my music.

R.C. In your own music, identity is established by melodic,
rhythmic, and other means, but especially by tonal-
ity. Do you think you will ever abandon the tonal
identification?

LS. Possibly. We can still create a sense of return to ex-
actly the same place without tonality: musical rhyme
can accomplish the same thing as poetic rhyme. But
form cannot exist without identity of some sort.

R.C. What is the feeling now about the use of music as

accompaniment to recitation (Persephone)?
LS. Do not ask. Sins cannot be undone, only forgiven.

21

THE SERIES

R.C. Do you think of the intervals in your series as tonal

intervals; that is, do your intervals always exert tonal

pull?
I.S. The intervals of my series are attracted by tonality;

I compose vertically and that is, in one sense at least,

to compose tonally.

R.C. How has composing with a series affected your own
harmonic thinking? Do you work in the same way—
that is, hear relationships and then compose them?

I.S. I hear certain possibilities and I choose. I can create
my choice in serial composition just as I can in any
tonal contrapuntal form. I hear harmonically, of
course, and I compose in the same way I always have.

R.C. Nevertheless, the Gigue from your Septet and the
choral canons in the Canticum Sacrum are much
more difficult to hear harmonically than any earlier
music of yours. Hasn't composing with a series there-
fore affected your harmonic scope?

I.S. It is certainly more difficult to hear harmonically
the music you speak of than my earlier music; but any
serial music intended to be heard vertically is more
difficult to hear. The rules and restrictions of serial
writing differ little from the rigidity of the great con-
trapuntal schools of old. At the same time they widen
and enrich harmonic scope; one starts to hear more
things and differently than before. The serial tech-
nique I use impels me to greater discipline than ever
before.

22

About Composing and Compositions

R.C.Do you think your time world is the same for the
kind of music you are now composing and for your
music of thirty-five years ago ( Mavra, piano Sonata,
piano Concerto, Apollo ) ?

I.S. My past and present time worlds cannot be the same.
I know that portions of Agon contain three times as
much music for the same clock length as some other
pieces of mine. Naturally, a new demand for greater
in-depth listening changes time perspective. Perhaps
also the operation of memory in a nontonally devel-
oped work (tonal, but not eighteenth-century-tonal
system) is different. We are located in time con-
stantly in a tonal-system work, but we may only "go
through" a polyphonic work, whether Josquin's Duke
Hercules Mass or a serially composed non-tonal-
system work.

R.C.Do you find any similarity in the time worlds of
oriental music and of certain recent examples of serial
music?

I.S. I do not think anything in the nature of the serial
idea makes series in essence "oriental." Schoenberg
himself was a cabalist, of course, but that is merely a
personal preoccupation. We have all remarked a mo-
notony (not in any pejorative sense) that we call
"oriental" in serial works, in Boulez's he Marteau sans
Maitre for instance. But the kind of monotony we
have in mind is characteristic of many kinds of poly-
phonic music. Our notion of what is oriental is an
association of instrumentation chiefly, but also of
rhythmic and melodic designs— a very superficial kind
of association indeed. I myself have no habit of any-
thing oriental and especially no measure of time in
oriental music. In fact, my attitude resembles that of

*3

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

Henri Micheaux: in the Orient I recognize myself
as a barbarian— that excellent word invented by Attic
Greeks to designate a people who could not answer
them in Attic Greek.

24

TECHNIQUE

R.C. What is technique?

LS. The whole man. We learn how to use it but we cannot
acquire it in the first place; or perhaps I should say
that we are born with the ability to acquire it. At
present it has come to mean the opposite of "heart,"
though, of course, "heart" is technique too. A single
blot on a paper by my friend Eugene Berman I in-
stantly recognize as a Berman blot. What have I
recognized— a style or a technique? Are they the
same signature of the whole man? Stendhal (in The
Roman Promenades) believed that style is "the man-
ner that each one has of saying the same thing."
But, obviously, no one says the same thing because
the saying is also the thing. A technique or a style for
saying something original does not exist a priori, it
is created by the original saying itself. We sometimes
say of a composer that he lacks technique. We say of
Schumann, for example, that he did not have enough
orchestral technique. But we do not believe that more
technique would change the composer. "Thought" is
not one thing and "technique" another, namely, the
ability to transfer, "express," or develop thoughts. We
cannot say "the technique of Bach" ( I never say it ) ,
yet in every sense he had more of it than anyone; our
extraneous meaning becomes ridiculous when we try
to imagine the separation of Bach's musical substance
and the making of it. Technique is not a teachable
science, neither is learning, nor scholarship, nor even
the knowledge of how to do something. It is creation
and, being creation, it is new every time. There are

*5

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

other legitimate uses of the word, of course. Painters
have water-color and gouache techniques, for exam-
ple, and there are technological meanings; we have
techniques of bridge building and even "techniques
for civilization/' In these senses one may talk of com-
posing techniques— the writing of an academic fugue.
But in my sense, the original composer is still his own
and only technique. If I hear of a new composer's
"technical mastery" I am always interested in the
composer (though critics employ the expression to
mean: "but he hasn't got the more important thing").
Technical mastery has to be of something, it has to
be something. And since we can recognize technical
skill when we can recognize nothing else, it is the
only manifestation of "talent" I know of; up to a point
technique and talent are the same. At present all of
the arts, but especially music, are engaged in "exami-
nations of technique." In my sense such an examina-
tion must be into the nature of art itself— an examina-
tion that is both perpetual and new every time— or it
is nothing. *

R.C. Your music always has an element of repetition, of
ostinato. What is the function of ostinato?

LS. It is static— that is, antidevelopment; and sometimes
we need a contradiction to development. However,
it became a vitiating device and was at one time over-
employed by many of us.

* In the case of my own music I know that my first works, the
Faune et Bergere and the Symphony in E-flat, lack personality
while at the same time they demonstrate definite technical
ability with the musical materials. The Faune sounds like
Wagner in places, like Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet in other
places (but never like Rimsky-Korsakov, which must have
troubled that master), and like Stravinsky not at all, or only
through thickly bespectacled hindsight.

26

INSTRUMENTATION

R.C. What is good instrumentation?

LS. When you are unaware that it is instrumentation. The
word is a gloss. It pretends that one composes music
and then orchestrates it. This is true, in fact, in the
one sense that the only composers who can be orches-
trators are those who write piano music which they
transcribe for orchestra; and this might still be the
practice of a good many composers, judging from the
number of times I have been asked my opinion as to
which instruments I think best for passages the com-
posers play on the piano. As we know, real piano
music, which is what these composers usually play, is
the most difficult to instrumentate. Even Schoenberg,
who was always an instrumental master (one could
make a very useful anthology of instrumental practice
in his music from the first song of op. 22 to Von Heute
auf Morgen with its extraordinary percussion, piano,
and mandolin), even Schoenberg stumbled in trying
to transfer Brahms's piano style to the orchestra (his
arrangement of Brahms's G-minor pianoforte quartet
for orchestra ) , though his realization of the cadenza
in the last movement with arpeggiated pizzicatos is a
master stroke. It is not, generally, a good sign when
the first thing we remark about a work is its instru-
mentation; and the composers we remark it of—
Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, Ravel— are not the best
composers. Beethoven the greatest orchestral master
of all in our sense, is seldom praised for his instrumen-
tation; his symphonies are too good music in every

27

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

way, and the orchestra is too integral a part of them.
How silly it sounds to say of the trio of the Scherzo
of the Eighth Symphony, "What splendid instru-
mentation"—yet, what incomparable instrumental
thought it is. Berlioz's reputation as an orchestrator
has always seemed highly suspect to me. I was
brought up on his music; it was played in the Saint
Petersburg of my student years as much as it has ever
been played anywhere in the world, * so I dare say
this to all the literary-minded people responsible for
his revival. He was a great innovator, of course, and
he had the perfect imagination of each new instru-
ment he used, as well as the knowledge of its
technique. But the music he had to instrumentate
was often poorly constructed harmonically. No or-
chestra skill can hide the fact that Berlioz's basses
are sometimes uncertain and the inner harmonic
voices unclear. The problem of orchestral distribution
is therefore insurmountable, and balance is regulated
superficially, by dynamics. This is in part why I prefer
the small Berlioz to the grandiose.

* I remember a description of Berlioz by Rimsky-Korsakov,
who had met the French master after one of the famous Berlioz
concerts in Saint Petersburg in the late sixties. Rimsky-Korsa-
kov, who was then twenty-three or twenty-four, had attended
the concert with other young composers of the group. They
saw Berlioz-in a tail coat cut very short in the back, Rimsky
said-conduct his own music and Beethoven's. Then they were
shepherded backstage by Stassov, the patriarch of Saint Peters-
burg musical life. They found a small man-Rimsky's words
were "a little white bird with pince-nez"-shivering in a fur
coat and huddled under a hot pipe which crossed the room just
over his head. He addressed Rimsky very kindly, "And you
compose music too?", but kept his hands in his coat sleeves, as
in a muffler.

28

About Composing and Compositions

Many composers still do not realize that our princi-
pal instrumental body today, the symphony orches-
tra, is the creation of harmonic-triadic music. They
seem unaware that the growth of the wind instru-
ments from two to three to four to five of a kind
parallels a harmonic growth. It is extremely difficult
to write polyphonically for this harmonic body, which
is why Schoenberg, in his polyphonic Variations for
Orchestra is obliged to double, treble, and quadruple
the lines. The bass, too, is extremely difficult to bring
out acoustically and harmonically in the Variations
because it is the lowest line, merely, and not bass-ic.
Though the standard orchestra is not yet an anachro-
nism, perhaps, it can no longer be used standardly
except by anachronistic composers. Advances in
instrumental technique are also modifying the use of
the orchestra. We compose for solo, virtuoso instru-
mentalists today, and our soloistic style is still being
discovered. For example, harp parts were mostly glis-
sandos or chords as recently as Ravel. The harp can
glissando and arpeggiate en masse, but it can't play
en masse as I have used it in my Symphony in Three
Movements. And, for another example, we are just
discovering the orchestral use of harmonics, especially
bass harmonics (one of my favorite sounds inciden-
tally; make your throat taut and open your mouth
half an inch so that the skin of your neck becomes a
drumhead, then flick your finger against it: that is the
sound I mean).

At the beginning of my career the clarinet was con-
sidered incapable of long fast-tongue passages. I
remember my Chopin instrumentations for Les
Sylphides in Paris in 1910 and an ill-humored clarinet
player telling me after he had stumbled on a rapid

29

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

staccato passage (the only way I could conceive
Chopin's pianism) "Monsieur, ce n'est pas une
musique pour la clarinette." What instruments do I
like? I wish there were more good players for the bass
clarinet and the contrabass clarinet, for the alto trom-
bone (of my Threni and Berg's Altenberg Lieder),
for the guitar, the mandolin, and the cymbalom. Do
I dislike any instrument? Well, I am not very fond
of the two most conspicuous instruments of the Lulu
orchestra, the vibraphone and the alto saxophone. I
do admit, however, that the vibraphone has amazing
contrapuntal abilities; and the saxophone's juvenile-
delinquent personality floating out over all the vast
decadence of Lulu is the very apple of that opera's
fascination.

R.C. Are you attracted by any new instruments— electric,
oriental, exotic, jazz, whatever?

I.S. Of course, I am attracted by many non-standard or-
chestral instruments, percussion ones especially, but
also stringed instruments like those Japanese ones I
have heard in Los Angeles, whose bridges are moved
during the performance. And let us not forget the
fact that traditional symphonic instruments like
trumpet and trombone are not the same when played
by jazz musicians. The latter people demonstrate
greater variety in articulation and tone color and, on
some instruments, the trumpet for instance, they ap-
pear to be at home in a higher range than the sym-
phonic player— the jazz trumpeter's high lip-trills.
We neglect not only the instruments of other ethnog-
raphies, however, but those of our greatest European
composer as well. This neglect is one reason why
Bach's Cantatas, which should be the center of our
repertoire, if we must have a repertoire, are compara-

30

About Composing and Compositions

tively unperformed. We don't have the instruments
to play them. Bach had families where we have single
instruments: trumpet families, trombone families,
oboe families, families for all sorts of the strings. We
have simplifications and greater resonance; where he
had the lute, perhaps the most perfect and certainly
the most personal instrument of all, we have the
guitar. I myself prefer Bach's string orchestra with its
gambas, its violino and 'cello piccolo, to our standard
quartet in which the 'cello is not of the same family
as the viola and bass. And, if oboes d'amore and da
caccia were common I would compose for them. What
incomparable instrumental writing is Bach's. You can
smell the resin in his violin parts, taste the reeds in the
oboes. I am always interested and attracted by new
instruments ( new to me ) but until the present I have
been more often astonished by the new resources
imaginative composers are able to discover in "old"
instruments. An entry in Klee's Tagebiicher says
(under May 1913) : Und das Mass ist noch nicht voll.
Man fuhrt sogar Schonberg auf, das tolle Melodram
Pierrot lunaire. And not yet full now either. For
example, Boulez's third piano sonata is quite as purely
"pianistic" as an Stude by Debussy, yet it exploits
varieties of touch (attack) untried by Debussy and
exposes in its harmonics a whole region of sound
neglected until now. ( These aspects of the piece are
secondary, however, to the aspect of its form; always
close to Mallarmean ideas of permutation, Boulez is
now nearing a concept of form not unlike that of the
idea of Un Coup de Des; not only does the pagination
of the score of his third piano Sonata resemble the
Coup de Des "score," but Mallarme's own preface to
the poem seems as well to describe the sonata:

31

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

". . . the fragmentary interruptions of a capital phrase
introduced and continued . . . everything takes place
by abridgement, hypothetically; one avoids the nar-
ration. . . ." Mallarme thought he was borrowing
ideas from music, of course, and would no doubt be
surprised to know that sixty years later his poem had
cross-pollinated the two arts; the recent publication of
he Livre de Mallarme * with its startling diagrams
of the mathematics of form must have been an un-
canny confirmation to Boulez. )

Thus an "old" instrument, the piano, interests me
more than an Ondes Martinot, for instance, though
this statement is in danger of giving the impression
that I am thinking of instrumentalism as something
apart from musical thoughts.

* By Jacques Scherer (Gallimard) , the first study of Mallarmes
unpublished notebooks and papers.

32

GESUALDO

R.C. What motivated you to compose new sextus and bas-
sus parts for the lost ones in Gesualdo's motet a sette?

I.S. When I had written out the five existing parts in score,
the desire to complete Gesualdo's harmony, to soften
certain of his malheurs, became irresistible to me. One
has to play the piece without any additions to under-
stand me, and "additions" is not an exact description;
the existing material was only my starting point: from
it I recomposed the whole. The existing parts impose
definite limits in some cases and very indefinite ones
in others. But even if the existing parts did not rule
out academic solutions, a knowledge of Gesualdo's
other music would. I have not tried to guess "what
Gesualdo would have done," however— though I
would like to see the original— I have even chosen
solutions that I am sure are not Gesualdo's. And
though Gesualdo's seconds and sevenths justify mine,
I don't look at my work in that light. My parts are
not attempts at reconstruction. I am in it as well as
Gesualdo. The motet would have been unusual, I
think, with or without me. Its form of nearly equal
halves is unusual, and so is its consistent and complex
polyphony. Many of the motets employ a more simple
chordal style, and with so many parts so close in range
one would expect a treatment of that sort: Gesualdo's
music is never dense. The bass part is unusual too.
It is of bass-ic importance as it seldom is in Gesualdo.
His madrigals are almost all top-heavy and even in
the motets and responses the bass rests more than
any other part. I don't think I am reading myself into
Gesualdo in this instance, though my musical think-

33

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

ing is always centered around the bass ( the bass still
functions as the harmonic root to me even in the music
I am composing at present). But this motet which
might be Gesualdo's ultimate opus would lead him to
unusual things by the mere fact of its being his unique
piece in seven parts. (By the same reasoning, I con-
tend that the lost volume of six-voice madrigals
contains more complex, more "dissonant" music than
the five-voice volumes, and the one reference we have
to any of the madrigals in that book, to Sei disposto,
bears me out; even his early six-part madrigal Donna,
se mancidete has a great number of seconds besides
those which are editors' errors. )

I would like to point out the very dramatic musi-
cal symbolization of the text that occurs at the
dividing point of the form. The voices narrow to
three (I am sure Gesualdo has done something simi-
lar) when at the words "seven-fold grace of the
paraclete" spread to seven full polyphonic parts.

I hope my little homage to Gesualdo and my own
interest in that great musician will help excite the
cupidity of other Gesualdines to the search for his
lost work: the trio for the three famous ladies of
Ferrara; the arias mentioned in Fontanelli's letters;
and, above all, the six-part madrigals. This music
must be in the Italian private libraries. (When Italy
has been catalogued everything will reappear; re-
cently Hotson, the Shakespearian, found a letter in an
Orsini library describing an Orsini ancestor's impres-
sions of a performance in Elizabeth's court of what
must have been the first night of Twelfth Night.)
Gesualdo was well related in Naples, in Ferrara, in
Modena, in Urbino, even in Rome (his daughter mar-
ried the Pope's nephew). Let us begin there.

34

TRANSLATION

R.C. No composer has been more directly concerned with
the problems of musical texts sung in translation.
Would you say something about the matter?

I.S. Let librettos and texts be published in translation,
let synopses and arguments of plots be distributed in
advance, let imaginations be appealed to, but do not
change the sound and the stress of words that have
been composed to precisely certain music at precisely
certain places.

Anyway, the need to know "what they are singing
about" is not always satisfied by having it sung in
one's own language, especially if that language hap-
pens to be English. There is a great lack of school for
singing English, in America at any rate; the casts of
some American productions of opera in English do
not all seem to be singing the same language. And
"meaning," the translators argument detre, is only
one item. Translation changes the character of a work
and destroys its cultural unity. If the original is verse,
especially verse in a language rich in internal rhymes,
it can only be adapted in a loose sense, not translated
(except perhaps by Auden; Browning's lines begin-
ning "I could favour you with sundry touches" are a
good example of just how extraordinary double-
rhymed verse sounds in English). Adaptation implies
translation of cultural locale and results in what I
mean by the destruction of cultural unity. For exam-
ple, Italian prestos in English can hardly escape
sounding like Gilbert and Sullivan, though this may
be the fault of my Russian-born, naturalized-Ameri-

35

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

can ears and of my unfamiliarity with other periods
of English opera ( if, after Purcell and before Britten,
there were other periods of English opera).

An example of translation destroying text and
music occurs in the latter part of my Renard. The
passage I am referring to— I call it a pribaoutki *—
exploits a speed and an accentuation that are natural
to Russian (each language has characteristic tempi
which partly determine musical tempi and charac-
ter ) . No translation of this passage can translate what
I have done musically with the language. But there
are many such instances in all of my Russian vocal
music; I am so disturbed by them I prefer to hear
those pieces in Russian or not at all. Fortunately Latin
is still permitted to cross borders— at least no one has
yet proposed to translate my Oedipus, my Psalms,
my Canticum, and my Mass.

The presentation of works in original language is
a sign of a rich culture in my opinion. And, musically
speaking, Babel is a blessing.

* A kind of droll song, sometimes to nonsense syllables, some-
times in part spoken. (I.S. )

36

2: Ah out Musicians and Others

SAINT PETERSBURG

R.C. Do you remember your first attendance at a concert?

I.S. My first experience of a public musical performance
was at the Mariinsky theater in Saint Petersburg.
My impressions of it are mixed with what I have been
told, of course, but as a child of seven or eight I was
taken to see A Life for the Tsar. We were given one
of the official loges, and I remember that it was
adorned with gilt "winged amours." The spectacle
of the theater itself and of the audience bewildered
me, and my mother said later that, as I watched the
stage, carried away by the sound of the orchestra
( perhaps the greatest thrill of my life was the sound
of that first orchestra), I asked her, as in Tolstoy,
"Which one is the theater?" I remember also that
Napravnik conducted the opera in white gloves.

The first concert of which I have any recollection
was the occasion of a premiere of a symphony by
Glazunov. I was nine or ten years old and at this
time Glazunov was the heralded new composer. He
was gifted with extraordinary powers of ear and
memory, but it was going too far to assume from that
that he must be a new Mozart; the sixteen-year old

37

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

prodigy was already a cut and dried academician.
I was not inspired by this concert.

R.C.Were you impressed by any visiting foreign musi-
cians in your student days in Saint Petersburg?

7.S. In the early years of this century most of the distin-
guished foreign artists who came to Saint Petersburg
made calls of homage to Rimsky-Korsakov. I was in
his home almost every day of 1903, 1904, and 1905,
and therefore met many composers, conductors, and
virtuosi there. Rimsky could speak French and Eng-
lish, the latter language having been acquired during
his term as a naval officer, but he did not know
German. As I spoke the language fluently from my
childhood, he sometimes asked me to translate for
him and a German-speaking guest. I remember meet-
ing the conductors Artur Nikisch and Hans Richter
in this way. The latter knew no word of any language
but German, and Rimsky, with no German-speaking
member of his family present, had to send for me.
When Richter saw me he scowled and asked "Wer ist
dieser JunglingF' I remember meeting Max Reger in
those years, at a rehearsal, I think. He and his music
repulsed me in about equal measure. Alfredo Casella
also came to Russia then, at the beginning of his
career. I did not meet him at that time, but heard
about him from Rimsky: "A certain Alfredo Casella,
an Italian musician, came to see me today. He
brought me a complicated score of incredible size,
his instrumentation of Balakirev's Islamey, and asked
me to comment on it and to advise him. What could
one say about such a thing? I felt like a poor little

child" and saying so he seemed humiliated.

I remember seeing Mahler in Saint Petersburg, too.

38

About Musicians and Others

His concert there was a triumph. Rimsky was still
alive, I believe, but he wouldn't have attended be-
cause a work by Tchaikovsky was on the program ( I
think it was Manfred, the dullest piece imaginable ) .
Mahler also played some Wagner fragments and, if I
remember correctly, a symphony of his own. Mah-
ler impressed me greatly— himself and his conducting.

R.C. Would you describe Rimsky-Korsakov as a teacher?

LS. He was a most unusual teacher. Though a professor at
the Saint Petersburg Conservatory himself, he ad-
vised me not to enter it; instead he made me the most
precious gift of his unforgettable lessons ( 1903-1906 ) .
These usually lasted a little more than an hour and
took place twice a week. Schooling and training in
orchestration was their main subject. He gave me
Beethoven piano sonatas and quartets and Schubert
marches to orchestrate and sometimes his own music,
the orchestration of which was not yet published.
Then as I brought him the work I did, he showed me
his own orchestra score, which he compared with
mine, explaining his reasons for doing it differently.
In addition to these lessons I continued my contra-
puntal exercises, but by myself, as I could not stand
the boring lessons in harmony and counterpoint I had
had with a former pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov.

R.C. What music of yours did Rimsky-Korsakov know?
What did he say about it? What were his relations
with new music: Debussy, Strauss, Scriabin?

I.S. When asked to go to a concert to hear Debussy's
music he said, "I have already heard it. I had better
not go: I will start to get accustomed to it and finally
like it." He hated Richard Strauss but probably for
the wrong reasons. His attitude toward Scriabin was

39

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

different. He didn't like Scriabin's music at all, but to
those people who were indignant about it his answer
was: "I like Scriabin's music very much."

He knew well my Symphony in E-flat, op. l, dedi-
cated to him, and also my vocal suite Faune et
Bergere, both performed in a concert arranged with
his help and supervision. He had seen the manuscript
of my Scherzo Fantastique, but his death prevented
him from hearing it. He never complimented me; but
he was always very closemouthed and stingy in prais-
ing his pupils. But I was told by his friends after his
death that he spoke with great praise of the Scherzo
score.

R.C. Did you have Maeterlinck's La Vie des Abeilles in
mind as a program for your Scherzo Fantastique?

LS. No, I wrote the Scherzo as a piece of "pure" sym-
phonic music. The bees were a choreographer's idea
as, later, the beelike creatures of the ballet (to my
string Concerto in D ) , The Cage, were Mr. Robbins's.
I have always been fascinated by bees— awed by
them after Von Fritsch's book and terrified after my
friend Gerald Heard's Is Another World Watching—
but I have never attempted to evoke them in my work
(as, indeed, what pupil of the composer of the Flight
of the Bumble Bee would?) nor have I been influ-
enced by them except that, defying Galen's advice
to elderly people (to Marcus Aurelius?) I continue
to eat a daily diet of honey.

Maeterlinck's bees nearly gave me serious trouble,
however. One morning in Morges I received a star-
tling letter from him, accusing me of intent to cheat
and fraud. My Scherzo had been entitled Les Abeilles
—anyone's title, after all— and made the subject of a
ballet then performing at the Paris Grand Opera

40

About Musicians and Others

( 1917). Les Abeilles was unauthorized by me and, of
course, I had not seen it, but Maeterlinck's name was
mentioned in the program. The affair was settled,
and, finally, some bad literature about bees was pub-
lished on the flyleaf of my score to satisfy my pub-
lisher, who thought a "story" would help to sell the
music. I regretted the incident with Maeterlinck
because I had considerable respect for him in Russian
translation. Sometime later I recounted this epi-
sode to Paul Claudel. Claudel considered Maeter-
linck to have been unusually polite to me: "He often
starts suits against people who say bonjour to him.
You were lucky not to have been sued for the 'bird'
part of the Firebird, since Maeterlinck had written
the Bluebird first." *

* Since writing this I have conducted three performances of
the Scherzo ("whether or not it is 'Fantastique' is up to us to
decide," one French critic wrote after its premiere in Saint
Petersburg under the baton of Alexander Ziloti) and was sur-
prised to find that the music did not embarrass me. The
orchestra "sounds," the music is light in a way that is rare in
compositions of the period, and there are one or two quite good
ideas in it, such as the flute and violin music at no. 63 and the
chromatic movement of the last page. Of course the phrases
are all four plus four plus four, which is monotonous, and, hear-
ing it again, I was sorry that I did not more exploit the alto
flute. It is a promising opus three, though.

I see now that I did take something from Rimsky's Bumble
Bee (numbers 49-50 in the score), but the Scherzo owes much
more to Mendelssohn by way of Tchaikovsky than to Rimsky-
Korsakov.

The progress of instrumental technique was illustrated to
me by these recent performances in an interesting detail. The
original score-written more than fifty years ago-employs three
harps. I remember very well how difficult all three parts were
for the harpists in Saint Petersburg in 1908. In 1930 I reduced
the three parts to two for a new edition of the orchestral mate-

41

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

This bee-ology reminds me of Rachmaninov, of all
people, for the last time I saw that awesome man he
had come to my house in Hollywood bearing me the
gift of a pail of honey. I was not especially friendly
with Rachmaninov at the time, nor, I think, was any-
one else: social relations with a man of Rachmaninov's
temperament require more perseverance than I can
afford: he was merely bringing me honey. It is curi-
ous, however, that I should meet him, not in Russia,
though I often heard him perform there in my youth,
nor later when we were neighbors in Switzerland,
but in Hollywood.

Some people achieve a kind of immortality just by
the totality with which they do or do not possess some
quality or characteristic. Rachmaninov's immortaliz-
ing totality was his scowl. He was a six-and-a-half-
foot-tall scowl.

I suppose my conversations with him, or rather with
his wife, for he was always silent, were typical:

Mme. Rachmaninov: What is the first thing you do when
you rise in the morning? (This could have been in-
discreet, but not if you had seen how it was asked. )

Myself: For fifteen minutes I do exercises taught me by a
Hungarian gymnast and Kneipp Kur maniac, or
rather I did them until I learned that the Hungarian
had died very young and very suddenly, then I stand
on my head, then I take a shower.

Mme. Rachmaninov: You see, Serge, Stravinsky takes
showers. How extraordinary. Do you still say you are
afraid of them? And you heard Stravinsky say that he

rial. Now I see that with a few adjustments the same music can
be performed by one player, so much quicker are harpists at
their pedals.

42

About Musicians and Others

exercises? What do you think of that? Shame on you
who will hardly take a walk.
Rachmaninov : ( silence )

I remember Rachmaninov's earliest compositions.
They were "watercolors," songs and piano pieces
freshly influenced by Tchaikovsky. Then at twenty-
five he turned to "oils" and became a very old com-
poser indeed. Do not expect me to spit on him for
that, however. He was, as I have said, an awesome
man, and besides, there are too many others to be
spat upon before him. As I think about him, his si-
lence looms as a noble contrast to the self-approba-
tions which are the only conversations of all perform-
ing and most other musicians. And he was the only
pianist I have ever seen who did not grimace. That
is a great deal.

R.C. When you were a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov, did you
esteem Tchaikovsky as much as you did later, in the
twenties and thirties?

LS. Then, as later in my life, I was annoyed by the too
frequent vulgarity of his music— annoyed in the same
measure as I enjoyed the real freshness of Tchaikov-
sky's talent ( and his instrumental inventiveness ) , es-
pecially when I compared it with the stale naturalism
and amateurism of the "Five" (Borodin, Rimsky-
Korsakov, Cui, Balakirev, and Moussorgsky ) .

R.C. What was Rimsky-Korsakov's attitude to Brahms, and
when did you yourself first encounter Brahms's mu-
sic?

LS. I remember reading the notice of Brahms's death in
New Time (the Saint Petersburg conservative news-
paper; I subscribed to it for Rozanov's articles ) and

43

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

the impression it made on me. I know that at least
three years prior to it I had played quartets and
symphonies by the Hamburg master.

Brahms was the discovery of my "uncle" Alexander
Ielatchich, husband of my mother's sister Sophie. This
gentleman, who had an important role in my early
development, was a civil service general and a
wealthy man. He was a passionate musical amateur
who would spend days at a time playing the piano.
Two of his five sons were musical, too, and one of them
or myself was always playing four-hand music with
him. I remember going through a Brahms quartet
with him this way in my twelfth year. Uncle Alex-
ander was an admirer of Moussorgsky and as such he
had little use for Rimsky-Korsakov. His house was
just around the corner from Rimsky's, however, and
I would often go from one to the other, finding it
difficult to keep a balance between them.

Rimsky did not like Brahms. He was no Wagnerite
either, but his admiration for Liszt kept him on the
Wagner-Liszt side of the partisanship.

R.C. What opinion did you have of Moussorgsky when you
were Rimsky-Korsakov's student? Do you remember
anything your father may have said about him? How
do you consider him today?

I.S. I have very little to say about Moussorgsky in con-
nection with my student years under Rimsky-Kor-
sakov. At that time, being influenced by the master
who recomposed almost the whole work of Moussorg-
sky, I repeated what was usually said about his "big
talent" and "poor musicianship," and about the "im-
portant services" rendered by Rimsky to his "em-
barrassing" and "unpresentable" scores. Very soon I

44

About Musicians and Others

realized the partiality of this kind of mind, however,
and changed my attitude toward Moussorgsky. This
was before my contact with the French composers,
who, of course, were all fiercely opposed to Rimsky's
"transcriptions/' It was too obvious, even to an in-
fluenced mind, that Rimsky's Meyerbeerization of
Moussorgsky's "technically imperfect" music could no
longer be tolerated.

As to my own feeling (although I have little con-
tact with Moussorgsky's music today), I think that in
spite of his limited technical means and "awkward
writing" his original scores always show infinitely
more true musical interest and genuine intuition than
the "perfection" of Rimsky's arrangements. My par-
ents often told me that Moussorgsky was a connoisseur
of Italian operatic music and that he accompanied
concert singers in it extremely well. They also said
that Moussorgsky's manners were always ceremonious
and that he was the most fastidious of men in his
personal relations. He was a frequent guest in our
house at Saint Petersburg.

R.C. You often conduct Glinka's overtures. Have you al-
ways been fond of his music?

I.S. Glinka was the Russian musical hero of my childhood.
He was always sans reproche, and this is the way I
still think of him. His music is minor, of course, but
he is not; all music in Russia stems from him. In 1906,
shortly after my marriage, I went with my wife and
Nikolsky, my civics professor at the University of
Saint Petersburg, to pay a visit of respect to Glinka's
sister, Ludmilla Shestakova. An old lady of ninety-
two or ninety-three, she was surrounded by servants
almost as old as herself and she did not attempt to

45

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

get up from her chair. She had been the wife of an
admiral and one addressed her as "Your Excellency ."
I was thrilled to meet her because she had been very
close to Glinka. She talked to me about Glinka, about
my late father whom she had known very well, about
the Cui-Dargomizhsky circle and its rabid anti-Wag-
nerism. Afterwards, as a memento of my visit, she
sent me a silver leaf of edelweiss.

R.C. Did you ever meet Balakirev?

I.S. I saw him once, standing with his pupil Liapunov,
at a concert in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.
He was a large man, bald, with a Kalmuck head and
the shrewd, sharp-eyed look of Lenin. He was not
greatly admired musically at this time. It was 1904
or 1905, and politically, because of his orthodoxy,
the liberals considered him a hypocrite. His reputa-
tion as a pianist was firmly established by numerous
pupils— however, all of them, like Balakirev himself,
ardent Lisztians; whereas Rimsky-Korsakov kept a
portrait of Wagner over his desk, Balakirev had one
of Liszt. I pitied Balakirev because he suffered from
cruel fits of depression.

R.C. You do not mention in your Autobiography whether
you attended Rimsky-Korsakov's funeral?

I.S. I did not mention it because it was one of the un-
happiest days of my life. But I was there and I will
remember Rimsky in his coffin as long as memory is.
He looked so very beautiful I could not help crying.
His widow, seeing me, came up to me and said, "Why
so unhappy? We still have Glazunov." It was the
crudest remark I have ever heard, and I have never
hated again as I did in that moment.

46

During a recording session. (Columbia Records Photo)

At Wiesbaden.

A family portrait.

Lausanne, 1914.

- ;iiir

m

Tete de Picasso que je n'ai pas reussi.'

A sketch by Picasso.

-mmrnrn-

With his children in Morges, Switzerland, 1915.
With Diaghilev in Seville, 1921.

u

\ mm ~V $

I

"I'f'tffl

Hk

Clarens, Switzerland, 1913.

Stravinsky and Rimsky-Korsakov at the teacher's home.

DIAGHILEV

R.C. What were Diaghilev's powers of musical judgment?
What, for example, was his response to Le Sacre du
Printemps when he first heard it?

LS. Diaghilev did not have so much a good musical
judgment as an immense flair for recognizing the
potentiality of success in a piece of music or work
of art in general. In spite of his surprise when I
played him the beginning of the Sacre ( Les Augur es
Printanieres) at the piano, in spite of his at first ironic
attitude to the long line of repeated chords, he quickly
realized that the reason was something other than
my inability to compose more diversified music; he
realized at once the seriousness of my new musical
speech, its importance, and the advantage of capi-
talizing on it. That, it seems to me, is what he thought
on first hearing the Sacre.

R.C. Was the musical performance of the first Sacre du
Printemps reasonably correct? Do you recall any-
thing more about that night of May 29, 1913, beyond
what you have already written?

LS. I was sitting in the fourth or fifth row on the right
and the image of Monteux's back is more vivid in
my mind today than the picture of the stage. He stood
there apparently impervious and as nerveless as a
crocodile. It is still almost incredible to me that he
actually brought the orchestra through to the end. I
left my seat when the heavy noises began— light noise
had started from the very beginning— and went back-
stage behind Nijinsky in the right wing. Nijinsky
stood on a chair, just out of view of the audience,

47

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

shouting numbers to the dancers. I wondered what
on earth these numbers had to do with the music, for
there are no "thirteens" and "seventeens" in the metri-
cal scheme of the score.

From what I heard of the musical performance it
was not bad. Sixteen full rehearsals had given the
orchestra at least some security. After the "perform-
ance" we were excited, angry, disgusted, and . . .
happy. I went with Diaghilev and Nijinsky to a res-
taurant. So far from weeping and reciting Pushkin
in the Bois de Boulogne as the legend is, Diaghilev's
only comment was "Exactly what I wanted." He cer-
tainly looked contented. No one could have been
quicker to understand the publicity value, and he
immediately understood the good thing that had hap-
pened in that respect. Quite probably he had already
thought about the possibility of such a scandal when
I first played him the score, months before, in the
east corner ground room of the Grand Hotel in
Venice.

K.C.Had you ever planned a Russian "liturgical ballet?"
If so, did any of it become Les Noces?

I.S. No, that "liturgical ballet" was entirely Diaghilev's
idea. He knew that a Russian church spectacle in a
Paris theater would be enormously successful. He had
wonderful ikons and costumes he wished to show and
he kept pestering me to give him music. Diaghilev was
not really religious, not really a believer, I suspect,
but only a deeply superstitious man. He wasn't at all
shocked by the idea of the church in the theater. I
began to conceive Les Noces, and its form was already
clear in my mind from about the beginning of 1914.
At the time of Sarajevo I was in Clarens. I needed
Kireievsky's book of Russian folk poetry, from which

48

About Musicians and Others

I had made my libretto, and I determined to go to
Kiev, which was the only place where I knew I could
get it. I took the train to Oustiloug, our summer home
in Volhynia, in July 1914. After a few days there I
went on to Warsaw and Kiev where I found the book.
I regret that on this last trip, my last view of Russia, I
did not see the Vydubitsky monastery which I knew
and loved. On the return trip the border police were
already very tense.

I arrived in Switzerland only a few days before
the war— thanking my stars. Incidentally, Kireievsky
had asked Pushkin to send him his collection of folk
verse, and Pushkin sent him some verses with a note
reading, "some of these are my own verses; can you
tell the difference?', Kireievsky could not and took
them all for his book, so perhaps a line of Pushkin's
is in Les Noces.

49

DEBUSSY

R.C. Of your early contemporaries, to whom do you owe
the most? Debussy? Do you think Debussy changed
from his contact with you?

LS. I was handicapped in my earliest years by influences
that restrained the growth of my composer's tech-
nique. I refer to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory's
formalism, from which, however— and fortunately—
I was soon free. But the musicians of my generation
and I myself owe the most to Debussy.

I don't think there was a change in Debussy as a
result of our contact. After reading his friendly and
commendatory letters to me ( he liked Petroushka very
much) I was puzzled to find quite a different feeling
concerning my music in some of his letters to his
musical friends of the same period. Was it duplicity,
or was he annoyed at his incapacity to digest the mu-
sic of the Sacre when the younger generation enthusi-
astically voted for it? This is difficult to judge now, at
a distance of more than forty years.

5o

LETTERS FROM DEBUSSY

(1)

80 AVENUE DU BOIS DE BOULOGNE

Saturday, 10th April 1913
(Letter sent to me in Oustiloug)

Dear Friend,

Thanks to you I have passed an enjoyable Easter vaca-
tion in the company of Petroushka, the terrible Moor,
and the delicious Ballerina. I can imagine that you spent
incomparable moments with the three puppets . . . and I
don't know many things more valuable than the section
you call "Tour de passe-passe" . . . There is in it a kind
of sonorous magic, a mysterious transformation of mechani-
cal souls which become human by a spell of which, until
now, you seem to be the unique inventor.

Finally, there is an orchestral infallibility that I have
found only in Parsifal. You will understand what I mean
of course. You will go much further than Petroushka, it
is certain, but you can be proud already of the achieve-
ment of this work.

I am sorry, please accept my belated thanks in acknowl-
edging your kind gift. But the dedication gives me much
too high a place in the mastery of that music which we
both serve with the same disinterested zeal . . . Unhap-
pily, at this time, I was surrounded with sick people!
Especially my wife who has been suffering for many long
days ... I even had to be the "man about the house" and
I will admit to you at once that I have no talent for it.

Since the good idea of performing you again is talked
about, I look forward with pleasure to see you soon here.

5i

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

Please don't forget the way to my house where everyone
is anxious to see you.

Very affectionately your
Claude Debussy

(»)

PARIS

8th of November 1913

Don't fall to the ground, Dear Friend, it is only me!!!
Of course, if we begin, you wishing to understand and I
to explain why I haven't written yet, our hair will fall out.

And then, something marvellous is happening here:
at least once a day everyone talks about you. Your friend
Chouchou * has composed a fantasy on Petroushka which
would make tigers roar ... I have threatened her with
torture, but she goes on, insisting that you will "find it
very beautiful." So, how could you suppose that we are
not thinking of you?

Our reading at the piano of he Sacre du Printemps,
at Laloy's * * house, is always present in my mind. It haunts
me like a beautiful nightmare and I try, in vain, to reinvoke
the terrific impression.

* Debussy's daughter Emma-Claude, who died one year after her
father.

* * Which Louis Laloy, the critic, incorrectly attributes to the spring
of 1913. What most impressed me at the time and what is still most
memorable from the occasion of the sight reading of he Sacre was
Debussy's brilliant piano playing. Recently, while listening to his En
blanc et noir (one of which pieces is dedicated to me), I was struck
by the way in which the extraordinary quality of this pianism had
directed the thought of Debussy the composer.

52

About Musicians and Others

That is why I wait for the stage performance like a
greedy child impatient for promised sweets.

As soon as I have a good proof copy of Jeux I will send
it to you ... I would love to have your opinion on this
"badinage in three parts": while speaking of Jeux, you
were surprised that I chose this title to which you pre-
ferred The Park. I beg you to believe that Jeux is better,
first because it is more appropriate, and then because it
more nearly invokes the "horrors" that occur among these
three characters. *

When are you coming to Paris, so one may at last play
good music?

Very affectionately from us three to you and your wife.

Your very old friend
Claude Debussy

(3)

15th May 1913

Dear Friend,

My telephone doesn't work and I fear you have tried to
call without success. If you have seen Nijinsky and if he
signed the papers please give them to the chauffeur. It is
urgent that they are at the Societe des Auteurs before five
o'clock. Thank you, your old Debussy.

(This note, brought by Debussy's chauffeur, refers to forms from
the Societe des Auteurs Debussy had given me to give Nijinsky,
the co-stage author of Jeux. I was seeing Nijinsky every day at this
time, and Debussy was only sure of reaching him through me. )

* Debussy was in close contact with me during the composition of
Jeux and he frequently consulted me about problems of orchestra-
tion. I still consider Jeux as an orchestral masterpiece, though I think
some of the music is "trop Lalique."

53

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky
(4)

PARIS

18th of August 1913

Dear Old Stravinsky,

Excuse me for being late in thanking you for a work
whose dedication is priceless to me. * I have been taken
with an attack of "expulsive gingivitis." It is ugly and
dangerous and one could wake up in the morning to dis-
cover one's teeth falling out. Then, of course, they could
be strung into a necklace. Perhaps this is not much consola-
tion?

The music from the Roi des Etoiles is still extraordinary.
It is probably Plato's "harmony of the eternal spheres"
( but don't ask me which page of his ) . And, except on Sirius
or Aldebaran, I do not foresee performances of this cantata
for planets'. As for our more modest Earth, a performance
would be lost in the abyss.

I hope that you have recovered. Take care, music needs
you. Kindly convey my respects to your charming mother
and best wishes to your wife.

Your old faithful
Claude Debussy

* I had dedicated my short cantata he Roi des Etoiles (1911) to
Debussy. He was obviously puzzled by the music and nearly right in
predicting it to be unperformable— it has had only a few perform-
ances in very recent years and remains in one sense my most "radical"
and difficult composition.

54

About Musicians and Others
(5)

PARIS

9 November 2913

Dear Stravinsky,

Because one still belongs to certain traditions, one won-
ders why one's letter is not answered . . . ! But the value
of the music I have received * is more important because
it contains something affirmative and victorious. Naturally,
people who are a little bit embarrassed by your growing
mastery have not neglected to spread very discordant ru-
mours—and if you are not already dead it is not their
fault. I have never believed in a rumour— is it necessary
to tell you this?— No! Also, it is not necessary to tell you
of the joy I had to see my name associated with a very
beautiful thing that with the passage of time will be more
beautiful still.

For me, who descend the other slope of the hill but
keep, however, an intense passion for music, for me it is a
special satisfaction to tell you how much you have en-
larged the boundaries of the permissible in the empire
of sound.

Forgive me for using these pompous words, but they
exactly express my thought.

You have probably heard about the melancholy end of
the Theatre des Champs Elysees? It is really a pity that
the only place in Paris where one had started to play music
honestly could not be successful. May I ask you, dear
friend, what you propose to do about it? I saw Diaghilev
at Boris Godunov, the only performance it had, and he
said nothing ... If you can give me some news without

* I had sent him the score of he Sacre du Printemps.

55

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

being indiscreet, do not hesitate. In any case are you com-
ing to Paris? "How many questions" I hear you saying . . .
If you are annoyed to answer. . . .

This very moment I received your postcard— and I see
by it, dear friend, that you never received my letter. It
is very regrettable for me— you are probably very angry
with me. Perhaps I wrote the address incorrectly. And
also, Oustiloug is so far away. I will not go to Lausanne—
for some complicated reasons which are of no interest to
you. This is one more reason for you to come to Paris— to
have the joy of seeing each other.

Know that I am going to Moscow the first of December.
I gather you will not be there? Believe me that for this
reason my journey will be a little more painful. I wrote to
Koussevitzky asking him for some necessary information-
he does not answer.

As for the "Societe de la Musique Actuelle" I want to do
my best to be agreeable and to thank them for the honour
they want to bestow on me. Only I don't know if I will have
enough time to stay for the concert.

My wife and Chouchou send you their affectionate
thoughts and ask not to forget to give the same to your
wife.

Always your old devoted
Claude Debussy

(6)

(postcard)

PARIS

November ij, 1913.
Dear Stravinsky. You have acquired the habit since child-
hood to play with the calendar and I confess that your

56

About Musicians and Others

last card confused me. At the same time I received a tele-
gram from Koussevitzky telling me that I am expected in
Moscow December 3 (new style). As the concert in St.
Petersburg is the 10th you can see that I will not have
time to do anything. Are you recovered from your cold?
I heartily hope so. If you have nothing better to do I ad-
vise you to go to Moscow. It is a marvellous city and you
probably don't know it very well. You will meet there
Claude Debussy, French musician, who loves you very
much.

Affectionately,
Claude Debussy

(7)

PARIS,

October 24th, 1915

First of all, dearest friend, it is a joy to hear from you at
last ... I had some news from your friends, who, I don't
know why, kept the state of your health and your residence
a mystery.

We are all doing somewhat better, or in other words we
are like the majority of the French people. We have our
share of sorrows, of spiritual and domestic difficulties.
But this is natural now that Europe and the rest of the
world think it necessary to participate in this tragic "con-
cert." Why don't the inhabitants of Mars join the fray?

As you wrote to me "they will be unable to make us join
their madness." All the same there is something higher
than brute force; to "close the windows" on beauty is
against reason and destroys the true meaning of life.

But one must open one's eyes and ears to other sounds
when the noise of the cannon has subsided! The world

57

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

must be rid of this bad seed. We have all to kill the mi-
crobes of false grandeur, of organized ugliness, which we
did not always realize was simply weakness.

You will be needed in the war against those other, and
just as mortal, gases for which there are no masks.

Dear Stravinsky, you are a great artist. Be with all your
strength a great Russian artist. It is so wonderful to be
of one's country, to be attached to one's soil like the
humblest of peasants! And when the foreigner treads upon
it how bitter all the nonsense about internationalism seems.

In these last years, when I smelled "austro-boches"
miasma in art, I wished for more authority to shout my
worries, warn of the dangers we so credulously approached.
Did no one suspect these people of plotting the destruction
of our art as they had prepared the destruction of our
countries? And this ancient national hate that will end
only with the last German! But will there ever be a 'last
German?" For I am convinced that German soldiers beget
German soldiers.

As for Nocturnes, Doret (the Swiss composer) is right,
I made many modifications. Unhappily, they are published
by a publisher, Fromont, Colysee Street, with whom I am
no more associated. Another trouble is that there are no
more copyists, at this moment, capable of doing this deli-
cate work. I shall search further and try to find a way to
satisfy M. Ansermet.

It must be confessed that music is in a bad situation
here ... It only serves charitable purposes, and we must
not blame it for that. I remained here for more than a year
without being able to write any music. Only during these
last three months spent at the seaside with friends have I
recovered the faculty of musical thinking. Unless one is
personally involved in it, war is a state of mind contra-
dictory to thought. That Olympian egotist Goethe is the

58

About Musicians and Others

only one who could work, it is said, the day the French
army came into Weimar . . . Then there was Pythagoras
killed by a soldier at the moment when he was going to
solve God knows what problem?

Recently I have written nothing but pure music, twelve
piano etudes and two sonatas for different instruments, in
our old form which, very graciously, did not impose any
tetralogical auditory efforts.

And you, dear friend, what have you been doing? Don't
for heavens sake think you have to answer that ques-
tion. I ask not out of vulgar curiosity but in pure affection.

And your wife and children? Have you worries about
them?

My wife suffered badly from her eyes and from an un-
bearable neuralgia-rheumatism. Chouchou has a cold; she
makes it into something very serious by the attention she
pays to her little person.

It is very difficult to know when we will see each other
and so we have only the weak resource of "words". . . .
Well, believe me your always devoted old

Claude Debussy
All our affectionate thoughts to your dear family. I have
received news from the "Societe des Auteurs" saying that
you had chosen me as godfather for your entry in that
society. I thank you.

59

JACQUES RIVIERE

R.C. You have said that Jacques Riviere, as editor of the
Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, was the first critic to
have had an intuition about your music. What were
his musical capabilities?

I.S. At this distance I am not really able to answer that,
for though I knew Riviere well before the 1914 war
I never saw him again after it, and in forty-five
years memories change color. However, I can say
that at the time I considered his criticism of my bal-
lets to be literary, inspired more by the whole specta-
cle than by my music. He was musical, certainly, and
his musical tastes were genuine and cultivated, but
whether he was capable of following the musical argu-
ment of he Sacre du Printemps I can no longer judge.
I remember Jacques Riviere as a tall, blond, intel-
lectually energetic youth, a passionate balletomane,
and at the same time a man with a deep religious
vocation. He came to Geneva from time to time when
I lived there, and these meetings with him always
afforded me much pleasure. He lived in semi-retire-
ment after the war, his health ruined by his years as a
prisoner of the Germans, and he died still young, a
broken man.

Rereading his letters I am struck (a) by the mal-
ady of the French about theater tickets; they will
do absolutely anything to get tickets except buy them;
if Riviere was so vivement interested in the Night-
ingale why didn't he go to the guichet and exchange
a few francs for them? and (b) by the evidence in
the fourth letter of how quickly fashion had turned
against Debussy in the year after his death.

60

LETTERS FROM JACQUES RIVIERE

(i)

EDITIONS DE LA NOUVELLE REVUE
FRANCAISE 35 AND 37 RUE MADAME,

PARIS

February 4, 1914

My dear Stravinsky,

I am rather late in telling you how grateful I am. But I
have been near you in my thoughts all these days as I have
started to put on paper some ideas about the 'Nightingale.*

You were very kind to have sent these two cards to
Gallimard and to me. They gave us great pleasure.

I intend to come to your concert * * Saturday and per-
haps I will be able to shake your hand.

Believe me, my dear Stravinsky. . . .

Jacques Riviere

*I was in Leysin in January 1914 completing the Nightingale.
Cocteau came there in the hope of persuading me to collaborate
with him on a work to be called David, and Diaghilev followed him
a few days later with the express intention of discouraging this same
project. Diaghilev-Cocteau relations were not ideal at the time, any-
way, as Diaghilev could not stand Cocteau's fondness for Nijinsky,
but Diaghilev's excuse for the trip was the Nightingale. Until then
he had ignored the existence of this opera (out of jealousy— it had
been commissioned by a Moscow theater) but recently the people
who were to produce it had declared bankruptcy, and he was now
very interested: I had been paid by them (10,000 rubles, a huge
sum of money for 1909), and he could have the opera for nothing.
We returned to Paris where I played the Nightingale for Ravel and
a group of friends. Among these was Jacques Riviere.

** I have no recollection of this concert.

61

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

(»)

PARIS,

May 25th, 1914
Dear Sir,

Is it extremely indiscreet of me to ask you for two or
three tickets to the premiere of the Nightingale? I take
this liberty only because yesterday evening I heard that
a large number of complimentary tickets are available.
You may well imagine how much I want my wife to hear
this work from which I myself anticipate so much pleas-
ure. * But if it is impossible please do not hesitate to re-
fuse me. * * If you are able to get tickets only for the second
performance I certainly will not refuse them though of
course I would prefer to attend the premiere. Yesterday I
again heard the music of Petroushka and with profound
emotion.

I beg you, dear sir, to excuse my importunity and to
believe in my friendship and sympathy.

Jacques Rwiere
15 rue froidevaux,
paris xtv

(3)

PARIS,

May 1914
Dear Sir,

You are exceedingly kind to have thought of me and I
thank you with all my heart. Unfortunately, I had gone
away the moment your telegram arrived and this is the

* He had attended some of the rehearsals.

** Sic.

62

About Musicians and Others

reason why I did not use the place you offered me in your
loge. I succeeded in entering the Opera, however, but the
conditions under which I heard the Nightingale were so
unfavourable that I am not yet able to judge it well. But
already I see that it promises me beautiful discoveries for
the next performances.

Again thank you, dear sir, and please believe in my
admiration and my sympathy.

Jacques Riviere

(4)

NOUVELLE REVUE FRANCAISE
35 AND 37 RUE MADAME, PARIS

April 6, iqiq

My dear Stravinsky,

I asked Auberjonois * to tell you how much pleasure
your letter gave me. Probably he has done so, but I thank
you most sincerely again.

It is another matter I want to talk to you about today,
however. Perhaps you already know that my friends have
decided to entrust me with the direction of the Nouvelle
Revue Frangaise, which will reappear June l. It is an hon-
our of which I am very proud, but it is also a heavy burden
and a source of grave preoccupations.

I intend to direct the attention of the magazine to the
anti-impressionist, anti-symbolist, and anti-Debussy move-
ments that are becoming more and more precise and
threatening to take the form and force of a vast new cur-
rent. I would be extremely happy if you think you could
show us in an article (you may decide the dimensions of it

* The late Swiss painter, Ren6 Auberjonois, who designed the first
production of my Histoire du Soldat.

63

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

yourself) your present ideas on music and the meaning of
the work you are devoting yourself to at the moment.

But do not think you have been forgotten here. Everyone
I see talks about you constantly. The influence of Pe-
troushka and Sacre and even of your recent works on the
younger musicians is obvious. An article by you will be
read with curiosity and sympathy everywhere in the world.
To make it easier for you, you could write it in Russian.
If you have no one around to translate it, I think I can
take charge of that, with the condition that the manu-
script you send me is very legibly written. Of course, I
will submit my translation to you for rectification.

I do not need to tell you that without promising moun-
tains of gold, I will assure you of our best possible fee for
your work.

Please forgive me for having fulfilled only one part of
the requests you charged me with when we last saw each
other in Geneva. Most of the people you asked me to see
were not in Paris when I arrived there, however, and I
myself was so long absent that by the time I finally re-
turned some of the requests were out of date.

I will confidently await your answer hoping that it will
not be otherwise than favourable, and with this conviction
I beg you my dear Stravinsky to believe in my deepest
friendship.

Jacques Riviere
P.S. Do not forget to give my best wishes to Ramuz **
and Auberjonois. If it will be difficult for you to send me
your manuscript because of the Russian, please inform me
and I will ask someone I know at the Foreign Affairs
Office to facilitate the sending, and obtain the necessary
authorization for you.

** C. F. Ramuz, the Swiss novelist and co-librettist with me of
V Histoire du Soldat.

About Musicians and Others

(5)

PARIS,

April 21, igig

My dear Stravinsky,

Of course your letter was disappointing as it deprives
me of your collaboration; but it delighted me also because
I think as you do, that a real creator should not lose his
time discoursing about the tendencies and consequences
of his art. His work must be self-explanatory. However, if
one day the desire overtakes you to write not about your-
self, but about others, about Debussy for instance, or Rus-
sian contemporary music, or some other subject, then think
about me and do not forget that our pages are always open
to you.

With friendship, your
Jacques Riviere
P.S. What is this new "Suite from the Firebird," a ballet?*

* My 1919 version of the Firebird suite, which I think he might have
guessed.

65

RAVEL

R.C. Have you any notion where the manuscript of yours
and Ravel's instrumentation of Khovanshchina might
be?

I.S. I left it in Oustiloug on my last trip to Russia and
therefore assume it to be lost or destroyed. (I wish
someone traveling in Volhynia and passing through
Oustiloug would investigate whether my house still
stands; not long ago some kind person sent me a
photograph of it but did not mention whether it had
survived the Nazi invasion, and I could not tell if the
photo was pre- or post-war. ) However, I feel certain
that Bessel had already engraved it in Russia just
before the [1914] war. The plates should exist, there-
fore, with the inheritors of Bessel's Russian firm. I
remember a money struggle with Bessel, who said
we were demanding too much and argued that
"Moussorgsky received only a fraction of what you
are asking." I replied that because they had given
Moussorgsky precisely nothing, because they had
succeeded in starving the poor man, was the greater
reason to give us more.

The idea of asking Ravel to collaborate with me on
an instrumentation of Khovanshchina was mine. I
was afraid not to be ready for the spring season of
1913 and I needed help. Unfortunately, however,
Diaghilev cared less about establishing a good instru-
mentation of the opera and rescuing it from Rimsky-
Korsakov than about our version as a new vehicle for
Chaliapin. That idiot from every nonvocal point of
view, and from some of these, could not realize the

66

About Musicians and Others

value of such instrumentation. He declined to sing,
and the project was abandoned, though we had al-
ready done considerable work. I orchestrated Shak-
lovity's famous and banal aria, the final chorus, and
some other music I no longer remember. Moussorgsky
had only sketched— really only projected— the final
chorus; I began with Moussorgsky's original and com-
posed it from Moussorgsky, ignoring Rimsky-Korsa-
kov.

Ravel came to Clarens to live with me, and we
worked together there in March-April 1913. At that
same time also, I composed my Japanese Lyrics
and Ravel his Trois Poemes de Mallarme which I
still prefer to any other music of his. I remember an
excursion I made with Ravel from Clarens to Varese,
near Lago Maggiore, to buy Varese paper. The town
was very crowded and we could not find two hotel
rooms or even two beds, so we slept together in one.

Ravel? When I think of him, for example, in rela-
tion to Satie, he appears quite ordinary. His musical
judgment was very acute, however, and I would say
that he was the only musician who immediately un-
derstood Le Sacre du Printemps. He was dry and
reserved, and sometimes little darts were hidden in
his remarks, but he was always a very good friend
to me. He drove a truck or ambulance in the war, as
you know, and I admired him for it, because at his age
and with his name he could have had an easier place
—or done nothing. He looked rather pathetic in his
uniform; so small, he was two or three inches smaller
than I am.

I think Ravel knew when he went into the hospital
for his last operation that he would go to sleep for
the last time. He said to me, "They can do what they

67

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

want with my cranium as long as the ether works."
It didn't work, however, and the poor man felt the
incision. I did not visit him in this hospital, and my
last view of him was in a funeral home. The top part
of his skull was still bandaged. His final years were
cruel, for he was gradually losing his memory and
some of his co-ordinating powers, and he was, of
course, quite aware of it. Gogol died screaming and
Diaghilev died laughing (and singing La Boheme,
which he loved genuinely and as much as any music),
but Ravel died gradually. That is the worst.

68

LETTERS FROM RAVEL
(i)

COMARQUES, THORPE-LE-SOKEN

13 December iqi^

Vieux— it's a long time since I've had any sensational news
about your health. Three weeks ago I heard about your
sudden death, but was not stricken by it as the same morn-
ing we received a postcard from you.

Delage * surely told you that your Japanese will be
performed January 14th together with his Hindus and my
Mallarmeans . . . We count on your presence.

I will be in London in three days and hope to hear talk
about the Sacre.

And the Nightingale, will he soon sing?

My respectful compliments to Mme. Stravinsky, kiss
the children, and believe in the affection of your devoted

Maurice Ravel

(2)

SAINT JEAN DE LUZ

14 February 1914

Dear Igor,
I hear from Mme. Casella * * that Madame Stravinsky

* Maurice Delage, the composer, a good friend to me at this time.
My Three Japanese Lyrics are dedicated to Maurice Delage, Florent
Schmitt, and Maurice Ravel respectively.

** The composer Alfredo Casella and his wife were living in Paris
at this time.

69

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

went to Leysin. I hope it is only a precaution. I beg you,
reassure me by a word.

I have taken refuge here in the country of my birthplace
to work, as work was becoming quite impossible in Paris.
Kiss the children for me, and present to Mme. Stravinsky
my respectful compliments. Believe in the affection of your
devoted

Maurice Ravel

(3)

SAINT JEAN DE LUZ

26 September, 1Q14

Give me news of yourself, mon vieux. What becomes of
you in all this?

Edouard * enlisted as a driver. I was not so lucky. They
did not need me. I hope that when they have re-examined
all the discharged soldiers, and after all the measures I
will take, to be back in Paris, if I have the means.

The thought that I would go away forced me to do five
months' work in five weeks. I have finished my Trio. But I
was obliged to abandon the works I hoped to finish this
winter; La Cloche Engloutie!! and a symphonic poem:
Wien!!! ** But, of course, that is now an untimely subject.
How is your wife? and the little ones? Write me quickly,
mon vieux. If you only knew how painful it is to be far
from everything!

Affectionate souvenirs to all. No news from the Benois.
What has become of them?

Maurice Ravel

* His brother.

* * Which became La Valse.

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About Musicians and Others
(4)

PARIS,

November 14, 1914

Cher vieux,

I am back in Paris . . . and it does not suit me at all.
I want to go away more than ever. I cannot work any more.
When we arrived Maman had to stay in bed. Now she
is up, but she has to keep to an albumin-free diet. Her age
and her anxieties are of course the cause of this condition.
No news from Edouard since the 28th October; a whole
month and we do not know what has happened to him.

Delage is now in Fontainebleau. From time to time he
is sent on a commission somewhere. Schmitt *, who was
bored to death in Toul, finally obtained permission to go
to the front. The Godebskis * * are still at Carantec. I still
haven't seen Misia.

Remember me to your family, cher vieux. Write to me
very soon I beg you. Believe in my brotherly friendship.

Maurice Ravel

(5)

December 19, 1914
Vieux,

It's settled: you come and sleep (uncomfortably) in the
lumber room, which was the bedroom of my brother, and

* Florent Schmitt.

°* Cipa Godebski, with his wife and children, Jean and Mimi. The
Godebskis (especially Misia Godebski Sert) were good friends of
Ravel and me. The issue of L'Oeil for Christmas 1956 contains a
history of this extraordinary family.

71

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

which was transformed into a Persian room for you. But
come quickly, otherwise you will not find me here any
more. I will be working as a driver. It was the only means
for me to get to the city, where I had to see Daphnis et
Chloe. You don't give me news from your brother. I hope
he is completely recovered. Try to hasten your arrival.
Our affectionate thoughts to you.
Maurice Ravel

(6)

January 2, 1915
Ainsi, vieux. Everything was prepared to give you, our
ally, a proper welcome. The Persian room with voiles from
Genoa, prints from Japan, toys from China, in short a
synthesis of the "Russian Season." Yes, there was even a
mechanical Nightingale— and you are not coming. . . .
Ah, the caprice of the Slav! Is it thanks to this caprice
that I received a note from Szanto *, who is delighted to
know that I will be in Switzerland at the end of January? I
wrote you that I will soon go away, but I doubt that they
will send me in your direction.

I wait for news from your brother and from you and all
your family. Meanwhile, accept all our affectionate wishes
for the New Year (New Style).

Devotedly,
Maurice Ravel

* Pianist and composer, acquaintance of all of us, he made a piano
transcription of the Chinese March in my Nightingale.

72.

About Musicians and Others
(7)

September 16, igig

Dear Igor,

I am heartbroken that I did not see you. Why didn't
you phone Durand * ? They would have given you my
address and my telephone number (Saint Cloud 2.33).
Well, I hope to meet you soon, perhaps even in Morges,
because I will try to go there to see my uncle before the
end of the fall. I continue to do nothing. I am probably
empty. Give me your news soon and if you go through
Paris again try to be a little bit cleverer and do a little
better.

To everybody my affectionate greetings,

Maurice Ravel

(8)

June 26, 1923

Dear Igor,

Your Noces are marvellous! And I regret that I couldn't
hear and see more performances of them. But it seemed
already unwise to come the other evening; my foot was
again very swollen and I now have to go back and rest
again until next Sunday at least. Thank you, mon vieux,

Affectionately,
Maurice Ravel

* The publishers.

73

SATIE

R.C. What do you recall of Erik Satie?

I.S. He was certainly the oddest person I have ever
known, but the most rare and consistently witty
person too. I had a great liking for him, and he ap-
preciated my friendliness, I think, and liked me in
return. With his pince-nez, umbrella, and galoshes he
looked a perfect schoolmaster, but he looked just as
much like one without these accouterments. He spoke
very softly, hardly opening his mouth, but he deliv-
ered each word in an inimitable, precise way. His
handwriting recalls his speech to me: it is exact,
drawn. His manuscripts were like him also, which is
to say, as the French say, fin. No one ever saw him
wash— he had a horror of soap. Instead he was forever
rubbing his fingers with pumice. He was always very
poor, poor by conviction, I think. He lived in a poor
section and his neighbors seemed to appreciate his
coming among them: he was greatly respected by
them. His apartment was also very poor. It did not
have a bed but only a hammock. In winter Satie
would fill bottles with hot water and put them flat
in a row underneath his hammock. It looked like
some strange kind of marimba. I remember once when
someone had promised him some money he replied:
"Monsieur, what you have said did not fall on a deaf
ear.

His sarcasm depended on French classic usages.
The first time I heard Socrate, at a seance where he
played it for a few of us, he turned around at the end

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About Musicians and Others

and said in perfect bourgeoisie, "Voila, messieurs,
dames."

I met him in 1913, I believe; at any rate, I photo-
graphed him with Debussy in that year. Debussy in-
troduced him to me and Debussy "protected" and
remained a good friend to him. In those early years
he played many of his compositions for me at the
piano. ( I don't think he knew much about instruments
and I prefer Socrate as he played it to the clumsy
orchestra score.) I always thought them literarily
limited. The titles are literary, and whereas Klee's
titles are literary, they do not limit the painting;
Satie's do, I think, and they are very much less amus-
ing the second time. But the trouble with Socrate
is that it is metrically boring. Who can stand that
much regularity? All the same, the music of Socrates'
death is touching and dignifying in a unique way.
Satie's own sudden and mysterious death— shortly
after Socrate— touched me too. He had been turned to-
wards religion near the end of his life and he started
going to Communion. I saw him after church one
morning, and he said in that extraordinary manner of
his: "Alors, fai un peu communique ce matin." He
became ill very suddenly and died quickly and
quietly.

75

SCHOENBERG, BERG, WEBERN

R.C.Will you describe your meeting with Schoenberg in
Berlin in 1912? Did you speak German with him?
Was he cordial or aloof? Was he an able conductor
of Pierrot? Webern was present at the Berlin rehears-
als of Pierrot; do you have any recollection of him?
You wrote about the instrumentation of Pierrot but
not about its use of strict contrapuntal devices or its
polyphony; how did you feel about these innova-
tions at the time?

I.S. Diaghilev invited Schoenberg to hear my ballets, Fire-
bird and Petroushka, and Schoenberg invited us to
hear his Pierrot Lunaire. I do not remember whether
Schoenberg or Scherchen or Webern conducted the
rehearsals I heard. Diaghilev and I spoke German
with Schoenberg, and he was friendly and warm, and
I had the feeling that he was interested in my music,
especially in Petroushka. It is difficult to recollect
one's impressions at a distance of forty-five years; but
this I remember very clearly: the instrumental sub-
stance of Pierrot Lunaire impressed me immensely.
And by saying "instrumental" I mean not simply the
instrumentation of this music but the whole contra-
puntal and polyphonic structure of this brilliant in-
strumental masterpiece. Unfortunately I do not re-
member Webern— though I am sure I did at least
meet him, in Schoenberg's house in Zehlendorf. Im-
mediately after the war I received some very cordial
letters from Schoenberg inquiring about various small
pieces of mine that he and Webern were preparing
for performance in his famous Vienna concert series,

76

About Musicians and Others

the Society for Private Performances. Then, in 1925,
he wrote a very nasty verse about me ( though I almost
forgive him, for setting it to such a remarkable mirror
canon). I do not know what had happened in be-
tween.

R.C. And Berg, did you know him?

LS. I met him only once, in Venice, in September 1934.
He came to see me in the greenroom at La Fenice,
where I conducted my Capriccio in a Biennale con-
cert with my son Soulima at the piano. Although
it was my first sight of him, and I saw him for only
a few minutes, I remember I was quite taken by his
famous charm and subtlety.

R.C. Has your estimate of Schoenberg and his position
been affected by the recent publication of his un-
finished works?

I.S. His scope is greatly enlarged by them, but I think
his position remains the same. However, any newly
revealed work by a master will challenge judgment
of him in some particular— as Eliot says that Dante's
minor works are of interest because they are by Dante,
so anything by Schoenberg, a piece of incunabula
like the 1897 string Quartet, an arrangement like his
1900 reduction for two pianos of the Barber of Seville,
are of interest to us because they are by Schoenberg.
The most interesting of the unfinished works are the
three pieces for an ensemble of solo instruments com-
posed in 1910 or 1911. They force us to reconsider
the extent of Webern's indebtedness respecting in-
strumental style and the dimension of the short
piece. * The last composed of the unfinished works,

* No. I have heard these pieces several times since. They are
not much like Webern, and the most memorable of them, the
third one, is very unlike Webern indeed.

77

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

the Modern Psalms of 1950-51 show that Schoenberg
continued to explore new ways and to search for
new laws of serial music right up to his death. Of
these posthumous publications Moses und Aron is
in a category by itself: whereas the other works
are unfinished, it is unfinished but complete— like
Kafka stories in which the nature of the subject makes
an ending in the ordinary sense impossible. Moses
und Aron is the largest work of Schoenberg's maturity
and the last he was to write in Europe. It does not af-
fect our view of his historical role, however. Jacob's
Ladder, or the hundred bars of it that are in a per-
formable state, might still do that: * it dates from
Schoenberg's period of greatest transition, is actually
the only composition to represent the years 1915-1922.
Schoenberg's work has too many inequalities for us to
embrace it as a whole. For example, nearly all of his
texts are appallingly bad, some of them so bad as to
discourage performance of the music. Then, too,
his orchestrations of Bach, Handel, Monn, Loewe,
Brahms differ from the type of commercial orchestra-
tion only in the superiority of craftsmanship: his
intentions are no better. Indeed, it is evident from
his Handel arrangement that he was unable to ap-
preciate music of "limited" harmonic range, and I
have been told that he considered the English vir-
ginalists and, in fact, any music that did not show
a "developing harmony," primitive. His expressionism
is of the na'ivest sort, as, for example, in the directions
for lighting the Gluckliche Hand; his late tonal works

* I now find Jacob's Ladder disappointing, and its Sprech-
stimme choruses less good than the beginning of Die Gluckliche
Hand. The latter work is in fact, so striking that it robs not only
Jacob's Ladder but even so late a work as Boulez's Le Visage
Nuptial of originality.

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About Musicians and Others

are as dull as the Reger they resemble or the Cesar
Franck, for the four-note motive in the Ode to Na-
poleon is like Cesar Franck; and his distinction be-
tween "inspired melody" and mere "technique"
("heart" vs. "brain") would be factitious if it weren't
simply naive, while the example he offers of the
former, the unison Adagio in his fourth Quartet,
makes me squirm. We— and I mean the generation
who are now saying "Webern and me"— must remem-
ber only the perfect works, the Five Pieces for Or-
chestra (except for which I could bear the loss of
the first nineteen opus numbers), Herzgewachse,
Pierrot, the Serenade, the Variations for orchestra,
and, for its orchestra, the "Seraphita" song from op.
22. By these works Schoenberg is among the great
composers. Musicians will take their bearings from
them for a great while to come. They constitute, to-
gether with a few works of not so many other com-
posers, the true tradition.

R.C. How do you now esteem Berg's music?

I.S. If I were able to penetrate the barrier of style (Berg's
radically alien emotional climate ) I suspect he would
appear to me as the most gifted constructor in form
of the composers of this century. He transcends even
his own most overt modeling. In fact, he is the only
one to have achieved large-scale development-type
forms without a suggestion of "neoclassic" dissimula-
tion. His legacy contains very little on which to build,
however. He is at the end of a development (and
form and style are not such independent growths
that we can pretend to use the one and discard the
other), whereas Webern, the Sphinx, has bequeathed
a whole foundation, as well as a contemporary sensi-
bility and style. Berg's forms are thematic ( in which

79

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

respect, as in most others, he is Weberns opposite);
the essence of his work and the thematic structure are
responsible for the immediacy of one form. However
complex, however "mathematical" the latter are,
they are always "free" thematic forms born of "pure
feeling" and "expression." The perfect work in which
to study this and, I think, the essential work, with
Wozzeck, for the study of all of his music— is the
Three Pieces for Orchestra, op. 6. Berg's personality
is mature in these pieces, and they seem to me a
richer and freer expression of his talent than the
twelve-note serial pieces. When one considers their
early date— 1914; Berg was twenty-nine— they are
something of a miracle. I wonder how many musicians
have discovered them even now, forty years late.
In many places they suggest the later Berg. The music
at bar 54 in Reigen is very like the "death" motive
first heard in Marie's aria in Wozzeck for example.
So is the drowning music in the opera like the music
from bar 162 in the Marsch. The waltz and the music
at bar 50 in Reigen are Wozzeckian, in the manner of
the second act's Tavern Scene, and the trill music with
which Reigen ends is like the famous orchestra trill
at the end of the first act of Wozzeck. The violin solo
at bar 168 in the Marsch is an adumbration of the
music of the last pages of Wozzeck, and the rhythmic
polyphony of the motive at bar 75 in the same piece is
like a quotation from the opera. There are forecasts
of the Kammerkonzert too, for instance, in the Nehen-
stimme figure at bar 55 in Reigen and in the solo violin
and wind music thereafter. And each of Lulus three
acts concludes with the same rhythm of chords em-
ployed near the end of Reigen.

Mahler dominates rather too much of the Marsch

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About Musicians and Others

but even that piece is saved by a superb (un-Mahler-
like) ending that is— I hope I may be forgiven for
pointing out— dramatically not unlike the ending of
Petroushka: climax followed by quiet, then a few
broken phrases in solo instruments, then the final pro-
test of trumpets; the last bar in the trumpets is one
of the finest things Berg ever did. The Three Pieces
for Orchestra must be considered as a whole. They are
a dramatic whole, and all three of them are related
thematically (the superb return of the theme of the
Preludium at bar 160 in the Marsch). The form of
each individual piece is dramatic also. In my judgment
the most perfect of these in conception and realization
is the Preludium. The form rises and falls and it is
round and unrepeating. It begins and ends in percus-
sion, and the first notes of the timpani are already
thematic. Then flute and bassoon state the principal
rhythmic motive in preparation for the alto trombone
solo, one of the noblest sounds Berg or anyone else
ever caused to be heard in an orchestra. Berg's orches-
tral imagination and orchestral skill are phenomenal,
especially in creating orchestral blocks, by which I
mean balancing the whole orchestra in several poly-
phonic planes. One of the most remarkable noises he
ever imagined is at bar 89 in Reigen, but there are
many other striking sonorous inventions; the tuba
entrance at bar 110 in Reigen, for instance, and bar
49 of the Preludium, and bar 144 of the Marsch

I have a photograph on my wall of Berg and Web-
ern together dating from about the time of the com-
position of the Three Pieces for Orchestra. Berg is
tall, loose-set, almost too beautiful; his look is out-
ward. Webern is short, hard-set, myopic, down-look-

81

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

ing. Berg reveals an image of himself in his flowing
"artist's" cravat; Webern wears peasant-type shoes,
and they are muddy— which to me reveals something
profound. As I look at this photograph I cannot help
remembering that so few years after it was taken
both men died premature and tragic deaths after
years of poverty, musical neglect, and, finally, musi-
cal banishment in their own country. I see Webern,
who in his last months frequented the churchyard
at Mittersill where he was later buried, standing there
in the quiet looking to the mountains— according to
his daughter; and Berg in his last months, suspecting
that his illness might be fatal. I compare the fate of
these men who heeded no claim of the world and
who made music by which our half century will be
remembered, compare it with the "careers" of con-
ductors, pianists, violinists— vain excrescences all.
Then this photograph of two great musicians, two
pure-in-spirit, herrliche Menschen, restores my sense
of justice at the deepest level.

R.C. Did you know Bartok personally?

LS. I met him at least twice in my life— once in London
in the nineteen twenties and later in New York in the
early forties— but I had no opportunity to approach
him closer either time. I knew the most important
musician he was, I had heard wonders about the
sensitivity of his ear, and I bowed deeply to his re-
ligiosity. However, I never could share his lifelong
gusto for his native folklore. This devotion was cer-
tainly real and touching, but I couldn't help regret-
ting it in the great musician. His death in circum-
stances of actual need has always impressed me as
one of the tragedies of our society.

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About Musicians and Others

R.C. Do you still feel as you once did about the late Verdi
(in the Poetics of Music)?

I.S. No. In fact, I am struck by the force, especially in
Falstaff, with which he resisted Wagnerism, resisted
or kept away from what had seized the advanced
musical world. The presentation of musical mono-
logues seems to me more original in Falstaff than in
Othello. Original also are the instrumentation, har-
mony, and voice-leading, yet none of these has left
any element of the sort that could create a school— so
different is Verdi's originality from Wagner's. Verdi's
gift is pure; but even more remarkable than the gift
itself is the strength with which he developed it from
Rigoletto to Falstaff, to name the two operas I love
best.

R.C. Do you now admit any of the operas of Richard
Strauss?

I.S. I would like to admit all Strauss operas to whichever
purgatory punishes triumphant banality. Their musi-
cal substance is cheap and poor; it cannot interest a
musician today. That now so ascendant Ariadne? I
cannot bear Strauss's six-four chords: Ariadne makes
me want to scream. Strauss himself? I had the op-
portunity to observe him closely during Diaghilev's
production of his Legend of Joseph more closely
than at any other time. He conducted the premiere
of that work and spent some time in Paris during
the preparation. He never wanted to speak German
with me, though my German was better than his
French. He was very tall, bald, energetic, a picture
of the bourgeois allemand. I watched him at rehears-
als and I admired the way he conducted. His manner
to the orchestra was not admirable, however, and

83

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

the musicians heartily detested him; but every cor-
rective remark he made was exact: his ears and his
musicianship were impregnable. At that time his mu-
sic reminded me of Bocklin and the other painters of
what we then called the German Green Horrors. I
am glad that young musicians today have come to
appreciate the lyric gift in the songs of the composer
Strauss despised, and who is more significant in our
music than he is: Gustav Mahler. My low esteem for
Strauss's operas is somewhat compensated by my ad-
miration for von Hofmannsthal. I knew this fine poet
and librettist well, saw him often in Paris, and, I
believe, for the last time at the Berlin premiere of
my Oedipus Rex (where Albert Einstein also came
to greet me). Hofmannsthal was a man of enormous
culture and very elegant charm. I have read him
recently, last year before traveling to Hosios Loukas—
his essay on that extraordinary place— and was
pleased to think him still good. His Notebooks ( 1922)
are one of my most treasured books.

R.C. Are you interested in the current revival of eight-
eenth-century Italian masters?

LS. Not very. Vivaldi is greatly overrated— a dull fellow
who could compose the same form so many times
over. And in spite of my predisposition in favor of
Galuppi and Marcello, ( created more by Vernon Lee's
Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy than by
their music) they are poor composers. As for Cima-
rosa, I always expect him to abandon his four-times-
four and turn into Mozart, and when he doesn't I
am more exasperated than I should be if there had
never been a Mozart. Caldara I respect largely be-
cause Mozart copied seven of his canons; I do not

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About Musicians and Others

know much of his music. Pergolesi? Pulcinella is the
only work of "his" I like. Scarlatti is a different mat-
ter but even he varied the form so little. Living part of
the last two years in Venice I have been exposed to
an amount of this music. The Goldoni anniversary
was an occasion to perform many Goldoni-libretto
operas. I always regret I cannot fully appreciate
Goldoni, with or without music— I do not understand
his language— but Goldoni interests me more than
his musicians. In the Teatro La Fenice or the Chiostro
Verde of San Giorgio, however, one likes everything a
little bit more than one might elsewhere.

The "Venetian" music I would like to revive is by
Monteverdi and the Gabrielis, by Cipriano and Wil-
laert, and so many others— why even the great
Obrecht was "Venetian" at one time— of that so much
richer and so much closer-to-us period. True, I heard
a Giovanni Gabrieli-Giovanni Croce concert there
last year, but almost nothing of the sense of their
music remained. The tempi were wrong, the orna-
mentation didn't exist or was wrong when it did, the
style and sentiment were ahead of the period by
three and a half centuries, and the orchestra was
eighteenth-century. When will musicians learn that
the performance point of Gabrieli's music is rhyth-
mic not harmonic? When will they stop trying to
make mass choral effects out of simple harmonic
changes and bring out, articulate, those marvelous
rhythmic inventions? Gabrieli is rhythmic polyphony.

85

DYLAN THOMAS

R.C. What was the subject of the "opera" you had planned
to write with Dylan Thomas?

I.S. I don't think you can say that the project ever got
as far as having a subject, but Dylan had a very
beautiful idea.

I first heard of Dylan Thomas from Auden, in New
York, in February or March of 1950. Coming late to an
appointment one day, Auden excused himself, saying
he had been busy helping to extricate an English poet
from some sort of difficulty. He told me about Dylan
Thomas. I read him after that, and in Urbana in the
winter of 1950 my wife went to hear him read. Two
years later, in January 1952, the English film producer
Michael Powell came to see me in Hollywood with a
project that I found very attractive. Powell proposed
to make a short film, a kind of masque, of a scene
from the Odyssey; it would require two or three arias
as well as pieces of pure instrumental music and
recitations of pure poetry. Powell said that Thomas
had agreed to write the verse; he asked me to compose
the music. Alas, there was no money. Where were the
angels, even the Broadway kind, and why are the
world's commissions, grants, funds, foundations never
available to Dylan Thomases? I regret that this proj-
ect was not realized. The Doctor and the Devils
proves, I think, that Dylan's talent could have created
the new medium.

Then in May 1953 Boston University proposed to
commission me to write an opera with Dylan. I was
in Boston at the time, and Dylan, who was in New

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About Musicians and Others

York or New Haven, came to see me. As soon as I saw
him I knew the only thing to do was to love him.
He was nervous, however, chain smoking the whole
time, and he complained of severe gout pains. . . .
"But I prefer the gout to the cure; I'm not going to let
a doctor shove a bayonet into me twice a week/'
His face and skin had the color and swelling of too
much drinking. He was a shorter man than I expected
from his portraits, not more than five feet five or six,
with a large, protuberant behind and belly. His nose
was a red bulb, and his eyes were glazed. He drank a
glass of whiskey with me, which made him more at
ease, though he kept worrying about his wife saying
he had to hurry home to Wales "or it would be too
late." He talked to me about the Rakes Progress. He
had heard the first broadcast of it from Venice. He
knew the libretto well and he admired it: "Auden is
the most skillful of us all." I don't know how much he
knew about music, but he talked about the operas he
knew and liked and about what he wanted to do. "His"
opera was to be about the rediscovery of our planet
following an atomic misadventure. There would be
a recreation of language, only the new one would have
no abstractions; there would be only people, objects,
and words. He promised to avoid poetic indulgences:
"No conceits, I'll knock them all on the head." He
talked to me about Yeats who he said was almost the
greatest lyric poet since Shakespeare, and quoted
from memory the poem with the refrain, "Daybreak
and a candle-end." He agreed to come to me in Holly-
wood as soon as he could. Returning there I had a
room built for him, an extension from our dining room,
as we have no guest room. I received two letters from

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Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

him. I wrote him October 25 in New York and asked
him for word of his arrival plans in Hollywood. I
expected a telegram from him announcing the hour
of his airplane. On November 9 the telegram came.
It said he was dead. All I could do was cry.

88

LETTERS FROM DYLAN THOMAS
(l)

THE BOAT HOUSE, LAUGHARNE
CARMARTHENSHIRE, WALES

16th June ig$3

Dear Mr. Stravinsky,

I was so very glad to meet you for a little time, in Boston;
and you and Mrs. Stravinsky couldn't have been kinder to
me. I hope you get well very soon.

I haven't heard anything yet from Sarah Caldwell *,
but I've been thinking a lot about the opera and have a
number of ideas— good, bad, and chaotic. As soon as I can
get something down on paper, I should, if I may, love to
send it to you. I broke my arm just before leaving New
York the week before last, and can't write properly yet.
It was only a little break, they tell me, but it cracked like
a gun.

I should very much like— if you think you would still
like me to work with you; and I'd be enormously honoured
and excited to do that— to come to California in late Sep-
tember or early October. Would that be convenient? I
hope so. And by that time, I hope too, to have some clearer
ideas about a libretto.

Thank you again. And please give my regards to your
wife and to Mr. Craft.

Yours sincerely,
Dylan Thomas

* Of Boston University.

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Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

THE BOAT HOUSE, LAUGHARNE
CARMARTHENSHIRE, WALES

September 22, 1953

Dear Igor Stravinsky,

Thank you very very much for your two extremely nice
letters, and for showing me the letter you had written to
Mr. Choate of Boston University. I would have written
again long before this, but I kept on waiting until I knew for
certain when I would be able to come to the States; and the
lecture agent there in New York, who makes my coming
across possible, has been terribly slow in arranging things.
I heard from him only this week. Now it is certain that I
shall be in New York on the 16th of October; and I'll have
to stay there, giving some poetry-readings and taking part
in a couple of performances of a small play of mine, until
the end of October. I should like then, if I may, to come
straight to California to be with you and to get down
together to the first stage of our work. ( I'm sure I needn't
tell you how excited I am to be able to write down that
word "our." It's wonderful to think of. )

One of my chief troubles is, of course, money. I haven't
any of my own, and most of the little I make seems to go
to schools for my children, who will persist in getting older
all the time. The man who's arranged my readings in
October, at a few Eastern universities and at the Poetry
Center, New York, is paying my expenses to and from
New York. But from there to California I will have to pay
my own way on what I can make out of these readings. I do
hope it will work out all right. Maybe I'll be able to give
a few other readings or rantings in California to help pay
expenses. (I'd relied on drawing my travelling expenses

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About Musicians and Others

etc. from the original Boston University Commission). I
want to bring my wife Caitlin with me, and she thinks she
can stay with a friend in San Francisco while I am working
with you in Hollywood. Anyway, I'll have to work these
things out the best I can, and I mustn't bother you with
them now. Money for California will come somehow, I'll
pray for ravens to drop some in the desert. The main thing,
I know, is for me to get to you as soon as possible, so that we
can begin— well, so that we can begin, whatever it will turn
out to be. I've been thinking an awful lot about it.

I was so sorry to hear that you had been laid up for so
long; I hope you're really well again by this time. My arm's
fine now and quite as weak as the other one.

If you don't write to me at Wales before I leave, about
October 7th, then my American address will be: c/o J. M.
Brinnin, Poetry Center, YM-YWHA, 1395 Lexington Ave-
nue, New York, 28. But anyway I'll write again as soon
as I reach there.

I'm looking forward enormously to meeting you again,
and to working with you. And I promise not to tell anyone
about it— (though it's very hard not to).

Most sincerely,
Dylan Thomas

9i

3: About My Life and Times
and Other Arts

R.C.I once heard you describe your childhood glimpses of
the Tsar Alexander III.

I.S. I saw the Tsar many times while walking with my
brothers and governess along the quays of Saint
Petersburg's Moyka river or by the adjacent canals.
The Tsar was a very large man. He occupied the
entire seat of a droshky driven by a troika coachman
as big and obese as himself. The coachman wore a
dark blue uniform the chest of which was covered
with medals. He was seated in front of the Tsar but
elevated on the driver's seat, where his enormous
behind, like a gigantic pumpkin, was only a few inches
from the Tsar's face. The Tsar had to answer greet-
ings from people in the street by raising his right hand
towards his temple. As he was recognized by every-
body, he was obliged to do this almost without inter-
ruption. His appearances gave me great pleasure, and
I eagerly anticipated them. We removed our hats
and received the Tsar's acknowledging gesture feel-
ing very important indeed.

I also saw the same Tsar in an unforgettable pag-
eant, a parade that passed our street on its way to the

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

Imperial Mariinsky Theater. It honored the Shah of
Persia and was the climax of an important state visit.
We were given places in the first floor window of our
hairdresser's. The most brilliant procession of all kinds
of cavalry passed by, imperial guards, coaches with
grand dukes, ministers, generals. I remember a long,
forestlike noise, the "hurrah" of the crowds in the
streets, coming in crescendo waves closer and closer
with the approaching isolated car of the Tsar and the
Shah.

R.C. Your father and Dostoievsky were friends. I suppose
you as a child heard a great deal about Dostoievsky?

I.S. Dostoievsky became in my mind the symbol of the
artist continually in need of money. My mother talked
about him in this way; she said he was always grub-
bing. He gave readings from his own works, and these
were supported by my parents, who complained, how-
ever, that they were intolerably boring. Dostoievsky
liked music and often went to concerts with my father.
Incidentally, I still consider Dostoievsky to be the
greatest Russian after Pushkin. Now, when one is
supposed to reveal so much of oneself by one's choice
of Freud or Jung, Stravinsky or Schoenberg, Dostoiev-
sky or Tolstoy, I am a Dostoievskyan.

R.C. I have heard you say you saw Ibsen "plain."
I.S. In May 1905, shortly after the separation of Norway
and Sweden, I and my younger brother Goury went
on a holiday to Scandinavia where we stayed for about
a month. We sailed from Saint Petersburg to Kron-
stadt and Helsingfors, staying in the latter city for a
few days with my uncle, who was the civil governor
of Finland. We then sailed to Stockholm, stopping
long enough to hear a performance of the Marriage
of Figaro, and through the beautiful Swedish lake

93

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

canals to Goteborg, where we changed boats for
Copenhagen and Oslo. It was delicious spring weather
in Oslo, cold but pleasant. One day it seemed like the
whole population was in the streets. We were riding
in a droshky, and the friend who was with us told me
to look at a smallish man on the sidewalk to our right.
It was Henrik Ibsen. He wore a top hat, and his hair
was white. He was walking with his hands folded
behind his back. Some things one sees never leave
the eyes, never move into the back part of the mind.
So Ibsen is in my eyes.

R.C. You were a friend of D'Annunzio's at one time, weren't
you?

I.S. I saw rather a lot of him just before the 1914 war, but
Diaghilev had known him before me; he was a great
enthusiast of our Russian Ballet. I met him for the
first time in Paris at Mme. Golubev's, a Russian lady
of the Mme. Recamier school— throughout one's entire
audience she would remain on a divan with her elbow
raised and her head propped on her hand. One day,
D'Annunzio entered her salon, a small man, brisk and
natty, very perfumed and very bald (Harold Nicol-
son's likening his head to an egg, in Some People, is an
exact comparison). He was a brilliant, fast, and very
amusing talker, so unlike the "talk" in his books. I
remember that he was very excited about my opera
The Nightingale; when after its premiere the French
press had generally attacked it, he wrote an article
in its defense, an article I wish I still had. I saw
him many times after that. He came to my apartment
in Paris, he came to performances of the Ballet and
to concerts of mine in France and Italy. Then, sud-
denly, it was discovered that his execrable taste in
literature went together with Mussolini's execrable

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

taste in everything else. He was no longer a "char-
acter" and no longer amusing. But whether or not
he survives as a readable author, his influence does
still survive: the interiors of many Italian homes still
follow descriptions in his novels.

On a recent visit to Asolo, to see the composer
Malipiero, I was strongly reminded of D'Annunzio.
Malipiero has a most extraordinary and not en-
tirely un-D'Annunzian house himself, a fine Vene-
tian building on a hillside. One enters under a
Latin inscription and plunges into darkest night.
The dark is in deference to pairs of owls who, from
covered cages in obscure corners, hoot the two notes,

m

in tune with Malipiero's piano after he plays them.
There is evidence in the garden of affection for other
of God's feathered creatures: chickens have been
buried in marked graves; Malipiero's chickens die of
old age.

R.C. You knew Rodin, didn't you?

I.S. I made his acquaintance in the Grand Hotel in Rome
shortly after the beginning of the First World War.
Diaghilev had organized a benefit concert there in
which I conducted the Suite from Petroushka. I
confess I was more interested in him because of his
fame than because of his art, for I did not share the
enthusiasm of his numerous and serious admirers. I
met him again, sometime later, at one of our ballet
performances in Paris. He greeted me kindly, as
though I were an old acquaintance, and at that mo-

95

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ment I remembered the impression his fingers had
made on me at our first handshaking. They were soft,
quite the contrary of what I had expected, and they
did not seem to belong to a male hand, especially not
to a sculptor's hand. He had a long white beard that
reached down to the navel of his long, buttoned-up
surtout, and white hair covered his entire face. He
sat reading a Ballet Russe program through a pince-
nez while people waited impatiently for the great old
artist to stand up as they passed in his row— not know-
ing it was he. It has been said that Rodin drew a
sketch of me. To the best of my knowledge that is not
so. Perhaps the author of that information was con-
fusing him with Bonnard who did, in fact, make a
fine ink portrait of me in 1913— lost, unfortunately,
with all of my belongings, in our estate in Russia.

R.C. Wasn't there also a question of Modigliani doing a
portrait of you?

I.S. Yes. I don't remember the circumstances very clearly
but I visited him in company with Leon Bakst in 1912
or 1913 because either he or I or Diaghilev had con-
ceived the project of his doing a portrait.

I don't know why it wasn't realized— whether
Modigliani was ill, as he so often was, or whether I
was called away with the ballet. At that time I had
an immense admiration for him. *

* A portrait of me by Modigliani has been discovered since
these remarks were made. It is a large picture in gray, black
and ivory oils, undated but similar in period style to the Max
Jacob and Cocteau portraits. It has been certified by such
experts as Zborovsky, Schoeller, and Georges Guillaume, and
by a statement from Picasso: "Je pense que ce tableau est un
portrait de Stravinsky, Cannes, le 18-9-57 (signe) Picasso/'
Modigliani must have done it from memory. I regret to have to
admit that it does resemble me.

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

R.C. One more "painter" question. I once heard you de-
scribe your meeting Claude Monet.

I.S. I don't know where Diaghilev found the old man or
how he managed to get him into a loge at one of our
Ballet Russe spectacles, but I saw him there and came
to serrer la main. It was after the war, in 1922 or 1923
I think, and of course no one would believe it was
Claude Monet. He wore a white beard and was nearly
blind. I know now what I wouldn't have believed
then, that he was painting his greatest pictures at
the time, those huge, almost abstract canvases of pure
color and light ( ignored until recently; I believe they
are in the Orangeries, but a very beautiful Water Lilies
which now looks as good as any art of the period, I go
to see in the Museum of Modern Art every time I am
in New York ) . * Old Monet, hoary and nearly blind,
couldn't have impressed me more if he had been
Homer himself.

R.C. You were with Mayakovsky very often on his famous
Paris trip in 1922?

I.S. Yes, but he was a closer friend to Prokofiev than to
me. I remember him as a somewhat burly youth— he
was twenty-eight or twenty-nine at the time— who
drank more than he should have and who was de-
plorably dirty, like many of the poets I have known.
Sometimes I am reminded of him when I see a photo-
graph of Gromyko, though I don't know just where
the resemblance is. I considered him a good poet and
I admired and still do admire his verses. However, he
insisted on talking to me about music, and his under-
standing of that art was wholly imaginary. He spoke
no French, and therefore with him I was always

* Alas, since I wrote this, the Water Lilies has been destroyed
by fire.

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Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

obliged to be a translator. I remember one such oc-
casion when I was between him and Cocteau. Curi-
ously, I found the French for everything Mayakovsky
said very easily, but not the Russian for Cocteaus
remarks. His suicide a few years later was the first
of the shocks that were to come regularly from Russia
thereafter.

R.C.Raymond Radiguet was often in your company the
year before his death. How do you remember him?

I.S. I saw him almost every day of 1922 that I spent in
Paris. He was a silent youth with a serene, rather
childlike look, but with something of the young bull
in him too. He was of medium build, handsome—
rather pederastically so, but without pederastic man-
ners. The first time I saw him he was with Cocteau.
I was sitting with Diaghilev in a cafe when they
appeared.

S.D.: "Qu'est ce que cest Fenvies ce nouveau true?"
I.S.: "Tu Tenvies?"
He immediately struck me as a gifted individual and
he also had the other intelligence, the machine a
penser kind. His opinions were immediate and they
were his, whereas the opinions of those around him
were too often "composed." I still think his poems
very good indeed and the two novels hardly less good.
The latter were autobiographical, of course, and
everyone in Paris knew who was who. But I remember
that when Radiguet died (at twenty) even the man
effigied as the Comte d'Orgel in the book was greatly
grieved.

R.C. While you are reminiscing, would you describe your

last meeting with Proust?
I.S. After the premieres of Mavra and Renard in June

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

1922, I went to a party given by a friend of mine,
Princess Violette Murat. Marcel Proust was there also.
Most of the people came to that party from my
premiere at the Grand Opera, but Proust came di-
rectly from his bed, getting up as usual very late in
the evening. He was a pale man, elegantly and
Frenchly dressed, wearing gloves and carrying a cane.
I talked to him about music, and he expressed much
enthusiasm for the late Beethoven quartets— enthu-
siasm I would have shared, were it not a commonplace
among the intellectuals of that time and not a musical
judgment but a literary pose.

R.C. Klee, Kandinsky, and Busoni attended the 1923
Weimar performance of Histoire du Soldat. Do you
remember anything about these gentlemen at the
time?

I.S. I was only a very short time at Weimar— just long
enough for the rehearsals and the performance of
Histoire, conducted by Hermann Scherchen. Of the
three artists you mention, I met only Ferruccio Busoni,
who was sitting at this performance in the same box
as I was. He had the noblest, most beautiful head I
have ever seen, and I watched him as much as the
stage. He seemed to be very much touched by the
work. But whether it was the play of Ramuz, my
music, or the whole thing, was not easy to determine,
especially since I knew that I was his bete noire in
music. Now, thirty-five years later, I have a great
admiration for his vision, for his literary talent, and
for at least one of his works: Doktor Faust. Un-
fortunately I did not meet Paul Klee there or later in
my life. * I did have the good fortune to know Kan-

* Klee's portrait drawing of me must have been done from
memory.

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dinsky in Paris in the 1930s and I will always remem-
ber him as an aristocrat, un homme de choix.

R.C. I often hear you speak of your admiration for Ortega y
Gasset. Did you know him well?

LS. I saw him only once, in Madrid in March 1955, but
I felt I knew him from his work long before that.
That night in Madrid he came to my hotel with
Madame la Marquise de Slauzol, and we drank a
bottle of whiskey together and were very gay. He
was charming and very kind. I have often thought
since that he must have been aware that he had
cancer; a few months later he was dead. He was not
tall, but I remember him as a large man because of
his great head. His bust reminded me of a Roman
statesman or philosopher, and I tried all evening to
recall just which Roman he really was. He spoke vivid
r-rolling French in a strong, slightly husky voice.
Everything he said was vivid. The Tagus at Toledo
was "arteriosclerotic"; Cordoba was "a rose bush but
with the flowers in the ground and the roots in the
air." The art of the Portuguese "is their memory of
China, of pagodas." Of his philosopher contempo-
raries he spoke reverently of Scheler, of Husserl, of
his master Cohen, of Heidegger. As for the Wittgen-
stein school: "Philosophy calling itself Logical Posi-
tivism now claims to be a science, but this is only a
brief attack of modesty." He talked about Spain (I
regret his Castles in Castile does not exist in English)
and laughed at tourists' sentiments "for the poor peo-
ple living in caves," which he said they do not do out
of poverty but because it is a very ancient tradition.
He was sympathetic and intelligent about the United
States when we talked of them— the unique European
"intellectual" I encountered that trip who knew some-

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

thing about them beyond what he had read in Mel-
ville and the magazines. He proudly showed me a
photograph, which he took from his wallet, of himself
and Gary Cooper taken in Aspen in 1949. He said that
Thornton Wilder had translated for him there, but
that his audiences had understood before the trans-
lations came "because of my extravagant gestures."

R.C. How did Giacometti come to make his drawings of
you?

I.S. He had done five or six designs from photographs
before he saw me and he didn't like them. Then,
sitting a few feet from me, he did a whole series,
working very fast with only a few minutes of actual
drawing for each one. He says that in sculpture also
he accomplishes the final product very quickly, but
does the sometimes hundreds of discarded prepara-
tory ones slowly over long periods of time. He drew
with a very hard lead, smudging the lines with erasers
from time to time. He was forever mumbling: "Non
. . . impossible . . . fe ne peux pas . . . une tete
violante . . . je nai pas de talent . . . fe ne peux
pas . . ." He surprised me the first time he came for
I expected a "Giacometti" tall and thin. He said he
had just escaped from an automobile manufacturer
who had been offering him a considerable sum to say
that automobiles and sculptures are the same things,
i.e., beautiful objects. In fact, Giacometti's almost
favorite topic was the difference between a sculpture
and an object. "Men in the street walking in different
directions are not objects in space." "Sculpture," he
said, "is a matiere transformed into expression, ex-
pression in which nature counts for less than style."
"Sculpture is expression in space, which means that
it can never be complete; to be complete is to be

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static." "All busts are ridiculous; the whole body is
the only subject for sculpture."

His conversation about sculptors was sometimes
surprising. He liked Pigalle, thought him the greatest
sculptor of the dix-huitieme, especially in the memo-
rial of the Marechale de Saxe at Strasbourg. He much
preferred Pigalle's rejected "Nude Voltaire" to Hou-
don's famous official "Voltaire" "because of its greater
nervousness." For him Canova was not really a sculp-
tor, while Rodin was "the last great Sculptor and in
the same line as Donatello (not the Rodin of the
Balzac or the Burghers, of course)." Brancusi wasn't
a sculptor at all, he said, but a "maker of objects."
I like Giacometti's work— I have one of those full-of-
sculptural-space paintings of his on my dining-room
wall— and I have an affection for himself, for his own
"nervousness." I like the character of him in a story
he told me. He had a great admiration for Klee and,
one time in the late 1930s when both artists were
living in Switzerland he at last determined to go and
call on him. He walked from the station to what he
thought was Klee's house— it was on a mountainside
some distance from the town— but when he arrived
there he discovered that Klee actually lived farther
up on the mountain. "I lost all courage and didn't
go— I had just enough courage to get that far."

102

PAINTERS OF THE RUSSIAN BALLET

R.C. Do you remember Balla's set for your Fireworks?

I.S. Vaguely, but I couldn't have described it even at
the time (Rome, 1917) as anything more than a few
splashes of paint on an otherwise empty backcloth,
I do remember that it baffled the audience, however,
and that when Balla came out to bow there was no
applause: the public didn't know who he was, what
he had done, why he should be bowing. Balla then
reached in his pocket and squeezed a device that
made his papillon necktie do tricks. This sent Dia-
ghilev and me— we were in a box— into uncontrollable
laughter, but the audience remained dumb.

Balla was always amusing and always likable, and
some of the drollest hours of my life were spent in
his and his fellow Futurists' company. The idea of
doing a Futurist ballet was Diaghilev's, but we de-
cided together on my Fireworks music: it was "mod-
ern" enough and only four minutes long. Balla had
impressed us as a gifted painter and we asked him to
design a set.

I made fast friends with him after that, visiting
him often in his apartment in Rome. He lived near
the zoo, so near in fact that his balcony overhung a
large cage. One heard animal noises in his rooms as
one hears street noises in a New York hotel room.
Futurism's headquarters were in Milan, however,
and it was there that my meetings with Balla and
also Boccioni, Russolo the noisemaker, Carra, and
Marinetti took place. Milan was to Switzerland as
Hollywood is to these hills, except that it was easier

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then to take the train and descend to the Italian city
for an evening performance than it is now to drive
to downtown Los Angeles. And in wartime Milan
my few Swiss francs made me feel agreeably rich.

On one of my Milanese visits Marinetti and Russolo,
a genial, quiet man but with wild hair and beard, and
Pratella, another moviemaker, put me through a dem-
onstration of their "Futurist Music." Five phonographs
standing on five tables in a large and otherwise empty
room emitted digestive noises, static, etc., remarkably
like the Musique Concrete of seven or eight years ago
(so perhaps they were Futurist after all; or perhaps
Futurisms aren't progressive enough). I pretended to
be enthusiastic and told them that sets of five phono-
graphs with such music, mass-produced, would surely
sell like Steinway grand pianos.

Some years after this demonstration Marinetti in-
vented what he called "discreet noises," noises to be
associated with objects. I remember one such sound
(to be truthful, it wasn't at all discreet ) and the object
it accompanied, a substance that looked like velvet
but had the roughest surface I have ever touched.
Balla must have participated in the "noise" movement,
too, for he once gave me an Easter present, a papier-
mache Pascha cake that sighed very peculiarly when
opened.

The most memorable event in all my years of
friendship with the Futurists was a performance we
saw together at the Milan puppet theater of The
Chinese Pirates, sl "drama in three acts." It was in fact
one of the most impressive theatrical experiences of
my life. The theater itself was puppet-sized. An invisi-
ble orchestra— clarinet, piano, violin, bass— played an
overture and bits of incidental music. There were tiny

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

windows on either side of the tiny stage. In the last
act we heard singing and were terrified to see that
it came from giants standing behind these windows;
they were normal-statured human singers, of course,
but we were accustomed to the puppet scale.

The Futurists were absurd, but sympathetically so,
and they were infinitely less pretentious than some
of the later movements that borrowed from them—
than Surrealism, for instance, which had more sub-
stance; unlike the Surrealists they were able to laugh
at their own pose of artist-contra-Gentiles. Marinetti
himself was a balalaika— & chatterbox— but he was
also the kindest of men. I regret that he seemed to me
the least gifted of the whole group— compared to
Boccioni, Balla, and Carra, who were all able painters.
The Futurists were not the airplanes they wanted to
be but they were at any rate a pack of very nice,
noisy Vespas.

R.C. Did you choose Nicolas Roerich to do the decors for
the Sacre du PrintempsP

I.S. Yes. I had admired his sets for Prince Igor and
imagined he might do something similar for the Sacre.
Above all, I knew he would not overload. Diaghilev
agreed with me, and accordingly, in the summer of
1912, I met Roerich in Smolensk and worked with
him there in the country house of the Princess
Tenischev, a patroness and liberal who had helped
Diaghilev.

I still have a good opinion of Roerich's he Sacre.
He had designed a backdrop of steppes and sky, the
Hie Sunt Leones country of old mapmakers' imagi-
nations. The row of twelve blond, square-shouldered
girls against this landscape made a very striking tab-

105

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

leau. And Roerich's costumes were said to have been
historically exact as well as scenically satisfying.

I met Roerich, a blond-bearded, Kalmuck-eyed,
pug-nosed man, in 1904. His wife was a relative of
Mitusov's, my friend and co-librettist of the Night-
ingale, and I often saw the Roerichs at Mitusov's
Saint Petersburg house. Roerich claimed descent from
Rurik, the Russo-Scandinavian Ur-Prince. Whether
or not this was true (he looked Scandinavian, but
one cant say such things any more), he was certainly
a seigneur. I became quite fond of him in those early
years, though not of his painting, which was a kind
of advanced Puvis de Chavannes. I was not sur-
prised during the last war to hear of his secret ac-
tivities and of his curious connection with Vice-
President Wallace in Tibet; he looked as though he
ought to have been either a mystic or a spy. Roerich
came to Paris for Le Sacre, but he received very little
attention and, after the premiere disappeared—
slighted, I think— back to Russia. I never saw him
again.

K.C.Was Henri Matisse your choice of painter for the
Chant du Rossignol sets?

I.S. No, his collaboration was Diaghilev's idea entirely.
In fact, I opposed it, but too directly. (Amiel says,
"Every direct resistance ends in disaster.") The pro-
duction and especially Matisse's part in it were
failures. Diaghilev hoped Matisse would do some-
thing very Chinese and charming. All he did do,
however, was to copy the China of the shops in the
Rue de la Boetie. Matisse designed not merely the
sets, as you say, but also the costumes and curtain.
Matisse's art has never attracted me, but at the time
of the Chant du Rossignol I saw him often and liked

106

About My Life and Times and Other Arts

him personally. I remember an afternoon together
with him in the Louvre. He was never a rousing
conversationalist but he stopped in front of a Rem-
brandt and started to talk excitedly about it. At one
point he took a white handkerchief from his pocket—
"Which is white, this handkerchief or the white in
that picture? Even the absence of color does not
exist, but only white' or each and every white."
Our Matisse collaboration made Picasso very an-
gry: "Matisse! What is a Matisse? A balcony with a
big red flowerpot falling all over it."

R.C. Do you remember Golovine's decors for the first Fire-
bird?

I.S. All I remember about them is that the costumes
pleased me at the time. The curtain was the curtain
of the Opera. I do not remember how many sets
Golovine did but I am certain that if I were trans-
ported back to that Firebird of 1910 I would find
them very opulent indeed.

Golovine was several years my senior, and he was
not our first choice. Diaghilev wanted Vroubel, the
most talented of all the Russian painters of that epoch,
but Vroubel was dying or going mad. We also con-
sidered Benois but Diaghilev preferred Golovine for
his realization of the fantastic scenes in Russian, and
Golovine's orientalism conformed to the ideals of Dia-
ghilevs own magazine, Mir Isskoustva, rather than
to the academic orientalism then so popular. As an
easel painter Golovine was a kind of Russian poin-
tillist.

I do not remember Golovine at the first Firebird
performance. Diaghilev probably did not have money
enough to pay his trip ( I myself received 1,000 rou-
bles, $500, for the commission and the expenses of all

107

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

the travel and stay in Paris ) . The first Firebird! I stood
in the dark of the Opera through eight orchestra
rehearsals conducted by Pierne. The stage and the
whole theater glittered at the premiere, and that is
all I remember.

R.C. How do you regard Leon Bakst?
LS. No one could describe him as concisely as Cocteau
has done in his caricature. We were friends from our
first meeting, in Saint Petersburg in 1909, though
our conversation was largely Bakst's accounts of his
exploits in the conquest of women, and my incredu-
lity: "Now, Lev . . . You couldn't have done all that."

Bakst wore elegant hats, canes, spats, etc., but I
think these were meant to detract from his Venetian
comedy-mask nose. Like other dandies Bakst was
sensitive— and privately mysterious. Roerich told me
that "Bakst" was a Jewish word meaning 'little um-
brella." Roerich said he discovered this one day in
Minsk when he was caught in a thunder shower and
heard people sending their children home for "Baksts,"
which then turned out to be what he said they were.

There was a question of Bakst designing Mavra
for me, but a money quarrel resulted with Diaghilev.
None of us ever reconciled, and I regretted it, es-
pecially when, only three years later, aboard the
Paris on my first trip to the United States, I saw the
notice of his death in the ship's newspaper.

Bakst loved Greece and all things Greek. He trav-
eled there with Serov ( Serov was the conscience of
our whole circle and a very important friend to me in
my youth; even Diaghilev feared him ) , and published
a book of travel diaries called, With Serov in Greece
( 1922) that ought to have been put into English long
ago.

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

I had seen Bakst's easel painting before I knew
any of his theatrical work but I could not admire it.
In fact, it represented everything in Russia against
which Le Sacre du Printemps is the revolt. I consider
Bakst's Scheherazade to be a masterpiece, however,
perhaps the perfect achievement of the Russian Ballet
from the scenic point of view. Costumes, sets, the
curtain, were colorful in an indescribable way— we
are so much poorer in these things now. I remember,
too, that Picasso considered Scheherazade a master-
piece. In fact, it was the one production of the ballet
he really did admire: "Vous savez, cest tres speciale,
mais admirablement fait!'

R.C. And Benois?

I.S. I knew him before I knew Bakst. He was at that time
the most cultivated Italophile I had ever met, and
except for Eugene Berman he would be still: and
Benois and Berman are very like in the fact of their
Russian background, their Romantic theater, their
Italophilia. Benois knew more about music than any
of the other painters, though of course the music he
knew was nineteenth-century Italian opera. I think
he liked my Petroushka, however, or at any rate, he
wasn't calling it Petrouchka-ka as many others of his
generation were. But Benois was the conservative of
the company, and Petroushka was his exceptional
work.

I collaborated with him in a small way before
Petroushka with two orchestrations contributed to
Les Sylphides. (I doubt I would like these arrange-
ments today— I no longer care for that "clarinet solo"
kind of music.) But though I was delighted with
his work in Les Sylphides I wouldn't have chosen
him to do Petroushka on the strength of it. My real

109

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

friendship with him began in Rome in 1911 when I
was finishing Petroushka. We stayed in the Albergo
Italia near the Quattro Fontane and for two months
were with each other every day.

Benois was very quickly up on his amour propre.
The ballet's greatest success at that time was the
Spectre de la Rose with Nijinsky, and Benois was
plainly jealous of Bakst's role in that success. Jealousy
accounts for an incident that occurred the following
year. Benois was painting the backdrop of Pe-
troushka's cell when Bakst happened on the set,
picked up a brush, and started to help. Benois fairly
flew at him.

R*C.And was Michel Larionov your choice of painter
for Renard?

I.S. Diaghilev suggested him first, but he became my
choice also. As you know, I composed Renard for the
Princess Edmonde de Polignac. In 1914 I was cut
off from my Russian estate money and lived in Swit-
zerland on a very small income. Diaghilev could pay
me nothing in those war years, so I accepted a com-
mission of 2,500 Swiss francs from the Princess de
Polignac. Diaghilev was furious with jealousy (but
Diaghilev was always jealous; I think I am fair in
saying that about him and I certainly knew him well
enough to be able to say it now). For two years he
would not mention Renard to me, which didn't pre-
vent him from talking about it to others: "Our Igor,
always money, money, money, and for what? This
Renard is some old scraps he found in his dresser
drawer/'

Diaghilev visited me in Ouchy in January or Feb-
ruary 1917, and I played Les Noces for him. He
wept (it was very surprising to see this huge man

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

weep), saying it had touched him more than any-
thing he had ever heard, but he would not inquire
about Renard even though he knew I had completed
it. And he knew also that the Princess Polignac had
no theater, that she had commissioned me only to
help me, that she would give Renard to him to per-
form. ( Some years later the Princess de Polignac gave
an avant-propos piano performance of Oedipus Rex at
her house and paid me 12,000 francs, which I gave to
Diaghilev to help finance the public performance.)

Larionov was a huge, blond mujik of a man, even
bigger than Diaghilev (Larionov, who had an un-
controllable temper, once knocked Diaghilev down).
He made a vocation of laziness, like Oblomov, and we
always believed that his wife, Goncharova, did his
work for him. He was a talented painter, nevertheless,
and I still like his Renard set and costumes. Renard
was performed together with Mama, as you know,
and both works were preceded by a big orchestral bal-
let which made my small-scale pieces seem even
smaller.

Renard was no huge success, but compared to it
Mama was even less of a "hit." Mama was very ably
designed by Survage, an unknown artist who had
been commissioned after Diaghilev had quarreled
with Bakst. The Mavra failure annoyed Diaghilev. He
was anxious to impress Otto Kahn, who attended the
premiere in Diaghilev's box and who was to have
brought the company to America. Otto Kahn s only
comment was "I liked it all, then— poop— it ends too
quickly." Diaghilev asked me to change the ending.
I refused, of course, and he never forgave me.

Another "ballet painter" I saw a lot of at this time
was Derain. I liked his "parigot" talk, liked him more

111

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

than his pictures, in fact, though there are charming
small Derains. He was a man of large build— Balthus's
portrait of him is a good resemblance— and a copious
drinker. During the latter activity furniture was some-
times smashed, but I always found Derain very agree-
able. I mediated for him in a quarrel with Diaghilev,
who wanted to change something in La Boutique
Fantasque. In his later years Derain was a solitary
figure and we no longer saw him at concerts or spec-
tacles. My last meeting with him was an extraordinary
coincidence. I was driving near Toulon and stopped
to walk in a pine wood. I came upon someone stand-
ing before an easel, painting, and it turned out to be
Derain.

Now that I have mentioned Derain I would also
like to record my associations with some other artists,
most of them associated with Diaghilev or the Ballet.
I think, for example, of Alexis Jawlensky. Diaghilev
had described him to me in Saint Petersburg days as a
strong follower of the new Munich school. In spite of
this he was a contributor to Mir Isskoustva; I say "in
spite" because Diaghilev considered the Munich
school to be the ultimate in "Boche" bad taste. I did
not meet Jawlensky in Russia but in Switzerland. At
the beginning of the war I was living in Morges and
he in St. Prex, which is nearby. I sometimes walked
with my children from our Morges house to his in St.
Prex. He was always hospitable, and his studio was a
little island of Russian color that delighted my
children.

Max Liebermann was another friend, especially
during the first period of our Ballet in Berlin. I made
his acquaintance, together with Gerhardt Haupt-
manns, after a performance of Petroushka and I saw

112

About My Life and Times and Other Arts

him quite often thereafter. He was a celebrated wit.
In a story then circulating, a portrait painter com-
missioned to do Von Hindenburg complains to
Liebermann of his inability to draw von Hindenburg's
features, whereupon Liebermann exclaims: "Ich kann
den Alten in den Schnee pissen." As you know, it was
Liebermann who nominated me to the Prussian
Academy.

Jacques-Emile Blanche was another friend of my
early Diaghilev years. He painted two portraits of me
that are now in the Luxembourg. I remember sitting
for him, and how he drew my head and features only
after a great amount of modeling, while everything
else, the body and the background, was added in
absentia. This meant that one's legs might turn out too
long and one's middle too capacious, or that one might
find oneself promenading on the beach at Deauville,
as I am made to do in one of my portraits. However,
Blanche's faces were usually accurately characterized,
and that was the important thing. Blanche was a fine
mouche for celebrities; he came to make my portrait
almost the morning after the premiere of the Firebird.

Robert Delauney was another painter I saw very
often at one time. He talked too much and too enthu-
siastically about "modern art," but was otherwise
quite likable. He did a portrait of me too. I don't know
what has become of it, but it was certainly better than
Albert Gleizes' cubist one, which is my mustache plus
what-have-you. Delauney never did design a ballet
for Diaghilev, but he was often with him, and in
Madrid, in 1921, we were all three constantly to-
gether.

Fernand L£ger I knew throughout the Diaghilev
period, but we were closer friends in the United States

113

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

during the second war. I remember a French dinner
we had prepared for him in our house in Hollywood
in the dark early days of the war. It concluded with
French Caporal cigarettes, and Leger was so touched
upon seeing these, he burst out crying. The Leger
drawing of a parrot on our living-room wall was given
to us by him at this time.

Pavel Tchelichev I met in 1922 in Berlin, where I
was awaiting my mother's arrival from the Soviet
Union (she had been petitioning since the Revolu-
tion for permission to emigrate, had at last obtained it,
but her boat was several times delayed). Tchelichev
was talented and handsome and he was quick to un-
derstand the value of that combination in the Diaghi-
lev ambience. I was not attracted by his earliest
"Russian style" paintings, but his sets for Nabokov's
ballet Ode convinced me of his abilities. Later he
made my Balustrade one of the most visually satisfy-
ing of all my ballets.

Marc Chagall I had heard of in Diaghilev days from
Larionov, who belonged to Chagall's circle of Russian
painters, but I first met him in New York. My wife,
Vera de Bosset, had arranged with him for a show of
his Aleko designs and sketches in her Hollywood gal-
lery, La Boutique. Accordingly, we called on him one
day in his Riverside Drive apartment. He was in
mourning for his wife and he hardly spoke without
mentioning her. (I now remember that Lipnitsky, the
photographer, was there and made several photo-
graphs of us together, but I have never seen them. )
Two or three years later Chagall was asked to do stage
settings and costumes for my Renard. I regret very
much that he refused (saying, as I was told, that he
wanted to do only "a major work of Stravinsky's").

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About My Life and Times and Other Arts

I still hope he will one day do Renard and Les Noces;
no one could be more perfect for them. Chagall's Fire-
bird was a very flamboyant exhibition, though perhaps
more successful in the painting than in the costumes.
He made an ink portrait of me and presented it to
me as a memento of our collaboration.

There were others too, like Marie Laurencin
( though I couldn't like her couleur de rose painting;
I like rose, of course, but not when I am emmerde with
it; and I had the same trouble with her gris after
Cocteau said: "Marie, tu as invente les nuances de
gris"); Constantine Brancusi; Braque (who gave
valuable and kind advice to my painter son, The-
odore ) ; Andre Bauchant ( a kind man; the idea that he
should decorate my Apollo was entirely Diaghilev's,
however, and his set for that ballet was very far from
what I had in mind); Christian Berard; and Georges
Rouault (with whom my wife worked designing the
ballet Fils Prodigue ) .

R.C. You must have seen a great deal of Jose Maria Sert
in the Diaghilev days.

I.S. Yes, but his wife Misia was much more a friend to
me and, in truth, I could not help finding Sert slightly
ridiculous. The Serts were among the first people I
met in Paris when I arrived there in 1910 (though
they were not yet legally Herts'). He knew a great
lot of "interesting people," especially "interesting rich
people," and he was very good at getting commissions
from them. I believe that he became a "painter of the
Russian Ballet" chiefly because he knew Fiirstner,
Richard Strauss's publisher. Diaghilev wanted Strauss
to compose a ballet, and the only way he could get
at him was through Fiirstner. Sert became the am-
bassador of the project and therefore its painter. The

115

Conversations tvith Igor Stravinsky

ballet was the Legend of Joseph, as you know. Sert's
sets for it were overcrowded, and the result was not
one of Diaghilev's greatest successes.

Sert might have figured more permanently in the
history of painting as a subject. A big, black-bearded
man, demode-distinguished, he would have made an
excellent portrait subject for Manet. His manner was
very grand, and he played at being Spanish, but he
had a sense of humor that somewhat redeemed these
affectations. I remember asking him once how he
intended to move one of his huge murals, and his
answer: "You turn a little valve and it deflates to
one hundredth the size/* We came to the U.S. on
the Normundie together in the 1930s, and the last
time I saw him was in the U.S. Poor Sert, he wanted
to be a painter, but his painting, alas, is quelconque.

R.C. Have you any notion where Picasso's backdrop for
Pulcinella might be?

I.S. It was in the dome of the Paris Opera, when I last
heard, and completely faded save for the moon, whose
yellow had been renewed, in part, by a cat. Dia-
ghilev, I suppose, was in debt to the Director of the
Opera, and when our company withdrew after the
Pulcinella performances the Picasso was kept there.
I have a vague recollection of meeting Picasso with
Vollard at my friend Prince Argutinsky's about 1910,
but I did not know him until 1917, when we were
together in Rome. I immediately liked his flat, un-
enthusiastic manner of speaking and his Spanish way
of accenting each syllable: "He ne suis pas musicien,
he comprends rien dans la musique," all said as
though he couldn't care less. It was the moment of
the Russian Revolution, and we could no longer pre-

116

About My Life and Times and Other Arts

cede our ballet programs with the imperial anthem.
I instrumentated the "Song of the Volga Boatmen*
to replace it, and on the title page of my manu-
script Picasso painted a red circle as a symbol of the
Revolution.

Picasso drew my portrait at this same time (the
first one; the armchair portrait was done in his Rue de
la Boetie apartment, and the third one was conceived
as a mutual gift from Picasso and myself to our friend
Eugenia Errazuriz). It was in the Hotel de la Russie,
near the Piazza del Popolo, where many of the ballet
dancers were staying, including Picasso's future wife
Olga ( Olga, who had changed his social life; she had
many new robes from Chanel to show, besides Picasso,
and suddenly the great painter was to be seen at
every cocktail party, theater, and dinner ) . Picasso was
always very generous in making gifts of his art. I have
a dozen paintings or drawings given to me by him at
various times, including some beautiful ink designs of
horses drawn on letter envelopes and a fine phallic
circle-drawing for a cover of my Ragtime.

We journeyed to Naples together (Picasso's por-
trait of Massine was drawn in the train) and spent
some weeks in close company there. We were both
much impressed with the Commedia del' Arte, which
we saw in a crowded little room reeking of garlic.
The Pulcinella was a great drunken lout whose every
gesture, and probably every word if I had under-
stood, was obscene. The only other incident of our
Neapolitan holiday I can remember is that we were
both arrested one night for urinating against a wall
of the Galleria. I asked the policeman to take us across
the street to the San Carlo Opera to find someone to
vouch for us. The policeman granted our request.

117

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

Then, as the three of us marched backstage, he heard
us being addressed as maestri and let us go.

Picasso's original Pulcinella was very different from
the pure commedia dell'arte Diaghilev wanted. His
first designs were for Offenbach-period costumes with
side-whiskered faces instead of masks. When he
showed them, Diaghilev was very brusque: "Oh, this
isn't it at all," and proceeded to tell Picasso how to do
it. The evening concluded with Diaghilev actually
throwing the drawings on the floor, stomping on them,
and slamming the door as he left. The next day all
of Diaghilev's charm was needed to reconcile the
deeply insulted Picasso, but Diaghilev did succeed
in getting him to do a commedia delTarte Pulcinella.
I might add that Diaghilev was equally against my
Pulcinella music at first. He had expected a strict,
mannered orchestration of something very sweet.

118

Venice, 1925.

Diaghilev's funeral procession, Venice, 1935.

|g%%^ %

With Robert Craft and Pierre Boulez.

lilliliiiii

#

Preparing for a performance of Persephone in New York.
above and facing page

iSilitis

Vw?1

The Stravinskys in a Venice restaurant after the premiere of the Canticum
Sacrum. (Columbia Records Photo)

At the Jolas Gallery for the opening of Mme. Stravinsky's first New York
showing, 1957.

Conducting the Canticum Sacrum at the Church of San Marco, Venice,
September, 1956. (Columbia Records Photo)

IiLr;

In the Church of San Marco at Venice. (Columbia Records Photo)

4: About Music Today

R.C. What do you mean when you say that critics are in-
competent?

7.S. I mean that they are not even equipped to judge one's
grammar. They do not see how a musical phrase is
constructed, do not know how music is written; they
are incompetent in the technique of the contemporary
musical language. Critics misinform the public and
delay comprehension. Because of critics many valua-
ble things come too late. Also, how often we read criti-
cisms of first performances of new music—in which
the critic praises or blames (but usually praises)
performance. Performances are of something; they
do not exist in the abstract, apart from the music
they purport to perform. How can the critic know
whether a piece of music he does not know is well
or ill performed?

R.C. What does "genius" mean to you?

7.S. A "pathetic" term strictly; or, in literature, a propa-
ganda word used by people who do not deserve ra-
tional opposition. I detest it literarily and cannot read
it in descriptive works without pain. If it doesn't al-
ready appear in the Dictionnaire des Idees Regues,
it should be put there, with, as its automatic re-
sponses, "Michelangelo" and "Beethoven."

119

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

R.C. What does "sincerity" mean to you?

I.S. It is a sine qua non that at the same time guarantees
nothing. Most artists are sincere anyway, and most
art is bad— though, of course, some insincere art ( sin-
cerely insincere) is quite good. One's belief that one
is sincere is not so dangerous, however, as one's con-
viction that one is right. We all feel we are right;
but we felt the same way twenty years ago and to-
day we know we weren't always right then.

R.C. Would you "draw" your recent music? For example:

h[*i* Chfitit

^PofufllOAfU

m

(B*chJ

(WAqHZ *») iVew sekausTs

I.S. This is my music:

fetTtf

120

HARMONY, MELODY, RHYTHM

R.C. You have often remarked that the period of harmonic
discovery is over, that harmony is no longer open to
exploration and exploitation. Would you explain?

I.S. Harmony, a doctrine dealing with chords and chord
relations, has had a brilliant but short history. This
history shows that chords gradually abandoned their
direct function of harmonic guidance and began to
seduce with the individual splendors of their har-
monic effects. Today harmonic novelty is at an end.
As a medium of musical construction, harmony offers
no further resources into which to inquire and from
which to seek profit. The contemporary ear requires
a completely different approach to music. It is one
of nature's ways that we often feel closer to distant
generations than to the generation immediately pre-
ceding us. Therefore, the present generation's inter-
ests are directed toward music before the "harmonic
age." Rhythm, rhythmic polyphony, melodic or in-
tervallic construction are the elements of musical
building to be explored today. When I say that I still
compose "harmonically" I mean to use the word in a
special sense and without reference to chord relations.

R.C. Isn't Busoni's famous "attempted definition of mel-
ody" ( 1922) a fairly accurate prophecy of the melodic
conception of many young composers today? "Mel-
ody," he said, "is a series of repeated rising and falling
intervals, which are subdivided and given move-
ment by rhythm; containing a latent harmony within
itself and giving out a mood-feeling; it can and does

121

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

exist independently of words as an expression and
independently of accompanying parts as a form; in
its performance the choice of pitch and of the in-
strument makes no difference to its essence."
I.S. The last two points are the most remarkable, coming
from Busoni. The idea that the actual pitch of the
note is not so important in an absolute sense has
been supplanted, to my mind, by the idea that pitch
matters only because of the interval. Today the com-
poser does not think of notes in isolation but of notes
in their intervallic position in the series, in their
dynamic, their octave, and their timbre. Apart from
the series, notes are nothing; but in the series their
recurrence, their pitch, their dynamic, their timbre,
and their rhythmic relation determine form. The note
functions only in the series. The form is serial, not
only some or all of the musical elements that compose
it. The individual note determines the form only as
part of its group or order.

R.C. Has any new development in the domain of rhythm
caught your attention?

I.S. The tempo controls— if tempo comes under the head-
ing of rhythm— in the central movement of Le marteau
sans maitre are an important innovation. In this move-
ment the beat is accelerated or retarded to basic fast
or slow metronome speeds with indications en route
of exactly the speed one should be traveling. This
amounts to controlled retard and accelerando. Used
systematically, as in the Marteau, where you are
never in a tempo but always going to one, these
controls are able to effect a new and wonderfully sup-
ple kind of music.
The free-but-co-ordinated cadenzas in Stock-

122

About Music Today

hausen's Zeitmasse (I have not yet heard his Grup-
pen for three orchestras) are also a rhythmic innova-
tion of great value.

In exploring the possibilities of variable meters
young composers have contributed but little. In fact,
I have seen no advance on the Sacre du Printemps,
if I may mention that work, in all the half century
since it was written.

R.C. Do you know that a whole school of Klangfarben-
melodie composers is flourishing at present?

I.S. Most of that is the merest stylistic imitation, of course,
and nothing could be more ephemeral. But the
German word needs definition; it has come to mean
too many things. For example, I don't think the
"melodie" part of it is good or useful applied to a
work such as Weberns Concerto and I am sure that
in the same piece farben is less important than klang-
design which isn't the same thing.

If by Klangfarbenmelodie you mean no more than a
line of music which is divided among two or more
instruments, that habit has already reached a re-
ductio ad absurdum. Looking at a ridiculously diffi-
cult score recently— it was really the map of an idea
that had begun not in musical composition but before
it— I was reminded of a Russian band I knew in my
childhood. This band was made up of twelve open-
that is, valveless— horns. Each horn had one note to
play and together they could produce the chromatic
scale. They would practice hours and hours in order to
surmount the rhythmic problems presented by simple
melodies. I do not see the difference between the
idea of this band of hunting horns and the idea of
some of the Klangfarben scores I have seen.

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If a serious composer intends the lines of two or
more instruments to produce one melodic line, I advise
him to follow Elliott Carter's practice in his string
Quartet and write out the one-line reduction as a
guide.

124

ELECTRONIC MUSIC

R.C. Do you have an opinion about electronic music?
LS. I think that the matiere is limited; more exactly, the
composers have demonstrated but a very limited
matiere in all the examples of electronic music I have
heard. This is surprising because the possibilities as
we know are astronomical. Another criticism I have is
that the shortest pieces of electronic music seem end-
less, and within those pieces we feel no time control.

Therefore, the amount of repetition, imaginary or
real, is excessive.

Electronic composers are making a mistake, in my
opinion, when they continue to employ significative
noises in the manner of musique concrete. In Stock-
hausen s Gesang der Junglinge, a work manifesting
a strong personality and an indigenous feeling for
the medium, I like the way the sound descends as
though from auras, but the burbling fade-out noises
and especially the organ are, I find, incongruous
elements. Noises can be music, of course, but they
ought not to be significative; music itself does not
signify anything.

What interests me most in electronic music so far
is the notation, the "score/'

R.C. In the music of Stockhausen and others of his gen-
eration the elements of pitch, density, dynamics,
duration, frequency (register), rhythm, timbre have
been subjected to the serial- variation principle. How
will the nonserial element of "surprise" be introduced
in the rigid planning of this music?

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Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

I.S. The problem that now besets the totalitarian serialist
is how to compose "surprise" since by electronic com-
puter it doesn't exist (though in fact it does, even if
every case is computable; even at its worst, we lis-
ten to music as music and not as a computing game ) .
Some composers are inclined to turn the problem
over to the performer— as Stockhausen does in Piano
Piece No. XI. I myself am inclined to leave very
little to the performers. I would not give them margin
to play only half or selected fragments of my pieces.
Also, I think it inconsistent to have controlled every-
thing so minutely and then leave the ultimate shape
of the piece to a performer (while pretending that
all possible shapes have been allowed for).

R.C. Do you think there is a danger at present of novelty
for its own sake?

I.S. Not really. Nevertheless, certain festivals of contem-
porary music by their very nature cannot help but
encourage mere novelty. And by a curious reversal of
tradition, some critics encourage it too. The classic
situation in which conservative and academic critics
deride the composer's innovations is no more. Now
composers can hardly keep up with the demands of
some critics to "make it new." Novelties sometimes
result that could not interest anyone twice. I am more
cautious of the power of the acclaimers than of the
disclaimers, of those critics who hail on principle
what they cannot possibly contact directly with their
own ears or understanding. This is musical politics,
not music. Critics, like composers, must know what
they love. Anything else is pose and propaganda, or
what D. H. Lawrence called, "would-be."

126

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC AND THE
GENERAL PUBLIC

R.C. Isn't the general public everywhere just as isolated
from contemporary music since about 1909 as the
Soviet Union?

I.S. Not everywhere; not in Germany where, for example,
my own later music is performed almost as frequently
for the general public as are Strauss and Sibelius
in the U.S. But the year 1909 means "atonality," and
"atonality" did create a hiatus which Marxists explain
as a problem of social pressures when in fact it was
an irresistible pull within the art.

R.C. Do you wish to say anything about patronage?

I.S. Haphazard patronage, whether or not it is better than
systematic patronage, is extremely inadequate. It
called into being all of the music of Schoenberg, Berg,
Webern, Bartok, and myself, though most of our music
was not called into being at all but only written and
left to compete against more conventional types of
music in the commercial market. This is part of the
reason why four of those composers died in mid-
twentieth century in humiliating circumstances, or
at least in circumstances that were far from affluent.
This kind of patronage has not changed in a hundred
and fifty years except that today there seems to be
less of it.

R.C. Do you know the present status of your music east of

NATO?
I.S. Friends who attended the Warsaw Conference of

Contemporary Music in October 1956 say that my

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music was officially boycotted there but enthusi-
astically received, nevertheless, by composers from
the Soviet sphere. My music is unobtainable— all of it
and in any form, disc or printed score— east of NATO;
not only my music but Webern's, Schoenberg's, Berg's,
as well. Russia's musical isolation— she will call it our
isolation— is at least thirty years old. We hear much
about Russian virtuoso violinists, pianists, orchestras.
The point is, of what are they virtuosi? Instruments
are nothing in themselves; the literature they play
creates them. The mandolin and guitar, for instance,
did not exist until Schoenberg imagined them in an
entirely new way in his Serenade. A new musical
masterpiece of that kind is a demand that musicians
be created to play it. The Soviet virtuoso has no
literature beyond the nineteenth century.

I am often asked if I would consent to conduct in the
Soviet Union. For purely musical reasons I could not.
Their orchestras do not perform the music of the three
Viennese and myself, and they would be, I am sure,
unable to cope with the simplest problems of rhythmic
execution that we introduced to music fifty years ago.
The style of my music would also be alien to them.
These difficulties are not to be overcome in a few
rehearsals; they require a twenty- or thirty-year tra-
dition. I discovered something of the same situation
in Germany at the end of the war. After so many
years of Hitler, in which my Histoire du Soldat,
Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, Berg's and Webern's
music were banned, the musicians were unable for
a long time to play the new music, though they have
certainly more than made up for it since.

It is the same thing with ballet. A ballet exists in
its repertoire as much as, or more than, in the tech-

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nical perfection of its dancers. The repertoire is a few
nineteenth-century ballets. These and sentimental,
realist, Technicolor Kitsch are all the Soviets do.
Ballet in this century means the Diaghilev repertory
and the creations of the very few good choreographers
since.

R.C.You have known American musical life since 1925;
would you comment on any aspect of its development
since then?

I.S. I hope I am wrong, but I fear that in some ways the
American composer is more isolated today than he
was in 1925. He has at present a strong tendency to
say, "We'll leave all of that avant garde stuff to Europe
and develop our own musical style, an American
style." The result of having already done that is now
clear in the way the "intellectual advanced stuff"
( some of it, that is, for at least 99 per cent of all avant
garde products are transparent puerilities) is embar-
rassing everybody; compared to Webern, for example,
most of our simple homespun "American style" is
fatuous in expression and in technique the vilest
cliche. In the phrase "American Music," "American"
not only robs emphasis from "music" but it asks for
lower standards. Of course, good music that has
grown up here will be American.

We have no capital for new music as New York was
a capital in 1925. Look at the League of Composers'
programs of the 1920s and see if anything comparable
is taking place in New York at the present. Of course,
more contemporary music is played there now, and
more American music, but the really consequential,
controversial, new music is not played and it was
then. True, we have those wonderful orchestras, but
they are growing flabby on their diet of repertoire

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and second-rate new music— too much sugar. Recently
I was asked to conduct two programs with one of the
glamorous American orchestras. But my programs
were rejected and the engagement canceled because
I refused to play Tchaikovsky instead of a program
entirely of my own music. This could not happen in
Europe and at this date it shouldn't happen here.
Boards of directors and managers must stop assum-
ing that their limited educations and tastes are re-
liable gauges for an audience's. An audience is an
abstraction; it has no taste. It must depend on the
only person who has (pardon, should have), the con-
ductor.

The United States as a whole has certainly a far
richer musical life today, with first-rate orchestras
everywhere and good opera production in places like
San Francisco, Santa Fe, Chicago, and the univer-
sities. But the crux of a vital musical society is new
music.

130

JAZZ

R.C. What is your attitude to jazz?

l.S. Jazz is a different fraternity altogether, a wholly dif-
ferent kind of music making. It has nothing to do
with composed music and when it seeks to be in-
fluenced by contemporary music it isn't jazz and it
isn't good. Improvisation has its own time world,
necessarily a loose and large one, since only in an
imprecisely limited time could real improvisation be
worked up to; the stage has to be set, and there must
be heat. The percussion and bass (not the piano;
that instrument is too hybrid, and besides most of
the players have just discovered Debussy) function as
a central heating system. They must keep the tem-
perature "cool," not cool. It is a kind of masturbation
that never arrives anywhere (of course) but that
supplies the "artificial" genesis the art requires. The
point of interest is instrumental virtuosity, instru-
mental personality, not melody, not harmony, and
certainly not rhythm. Rhythm doesn't exist really
because no rhythmic proportion or relaxation exists.
Instead of rhythm there is "beat." The players beat
all the time, merely to keep up and to know which
side of the beat they are on. The ideas are instru-
mental, or, rather, they aren't ideas because they
come after, come from the instruments. Shorty Rog-
ers's trumpet playing is an example of what I mean
by instrumental derivation, though his trumpet is
really a deep-bored, bugle-sounding instrument which
reminds me of the keyed bugles I liked so much and

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wrote for in the first version of Les Noces. * His
patterns are instrumental: half -valve effects with lip
glissandi, intervals and runs that derive from the
fingers, "trills" on one note, for example, G to G on
a B-flat instrument (between open and first-and-third
fingers ) , etc.

As an example of what I have said about timing, I
can listen to Shorty Rogers's good style, with its
dotted-note tradition, for stretches of fifteen minutes
and more and not feel the time at all, whereas the
weight of every "serious" virtuoso I know depresses
me beyond the counteraction of Equanil in about
five. Has jazz influenced me? Jazz patterns and es-
pecially jazz instrumental combinations did influence
me forty years ago, of course, but not the idea of
jazz. As I say, that is another world. I don't follow it
but I respect it. It can be an art of very touching dig-
nity, as it is in the New Orleans jazz funerals. And, at
its rare best, it is certainly the best musical entertain-
ment in the U.S.

* Hearing Mr. Rogers play this instrument in Los Angeles last
year perhaps influenced me to use it in Threni.

132

THE PERFORMANCE OF MUSIC

R.C. Do you agree that in some cases the composer should
indicate how he wishes the conductor to beat his
music?

I.S. I think he should always indicate the unit of the beat
and whether or not a subdivision is to be felt. Also,
he should show whether the conductor is to beat the
beat or the rhythmic shape of the music, if that shape
is against the beat. For example, the triplets, three
in the time of four, in Webern's Das Augenlicht and
in my Surge Aquilo: I contend that to beat three here
(in other words, to beat the music) is to lose the
"in the time of four" feeling, and instead of a triplet
feeling you have merely a three-beat bar in a new
tempo.

R.C. Do you agree with Schoenberg's premise that a good
composition is playable in only one tempo? ( Schoen-
berg's example of a piece of music of uncertain tempo
was the Austrian hymn from Haydn's Emperor Quar-
tet).

I.S. I think that any musical composition must necessarily
possess its unique tempo ( pulsation ) : the variety of
tempi comes from performers who often are not very
familiar with the composition they perform or feel a
personal interest in interpreting it. In the case of
Haydn s famous melody, if there is any uncertainty in
the tempo the fault is in the alarming behavior of its
numerous interpreters.

R.C. Have you ever considered whether a piece of "classic"

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music is more difficult to kill by misperf ormance than
a "romantic" piece?
I.S. It depends, of course, on what we decide to mean by
those divisions and also on the kinds and degrees of
misperf ormance. Let us take refuge in examples, con-
temporary ones, preferably. My Agon and Berg's Kam-
merkonzert divide, I should think, on most of the
characteristic issues we imagine to determine those
categories.

The Kammerkonzert depends strongly on mood or
interpretation. Unless mood dominates the whole, the
parts do not relate, the form is not achieved, detail is
not suffused, and the music fails to say what it has
to say— for "romantic" pieces are presumed to have
messages beyond the purely musical messages of their
notes. The romantic piece is always in need of a "per-
fect" performance. By "perfect" one means inspired
—rather than strict or correct. In fact, considerable
fluctuations in tempo are possible in a "romantic"
piece (metronomes are marked circa in the Berg, and
performance times sometimes diverge as much as ten
minutes ) . There are other freedoms as well, and "free-
dom" itself must be conveyed by the performer of a
"romantic" piece.

It is interesting to note that conductors' careers
are made for the most part with "romantic" music.
"Classic" music eliminates the conductor; we do not
remember him in it and we think we need him for his
metier alone, not for his mediumistic abilities— I am
speaking of my music.

But does all of this turned around fit the contrary?
Perhaps, though the question of degree is important,
for the characteristics of each category apply at some
point to both. For example, when a conductor has

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ruined a piece of mine, having failed to convey a
sense of "freedom" and 'mood/' let him not tell me
that these things are joined exclusively to another
kind of music.

R.C.What do you regard as the principal performance
problems of your music?

I.S. Tempo is the principal item. A piece of mine can
survive almost anything but wrong or uncertain
tempo. ( To anticipate your next question, yes, a tempo
can be metronomically wrong but right in spirit,
though obviously the metronomic margin cannot be
very great. ) And not only my music, of course. What
does it matter if the trills, the ornamentation, and the
instruments themselves are all correct in the perform-
ance of a Bach concerto if the tempo is absurd? I
have often said that my music is to be "read," to be
"executed," but not to be "interpreted." I will say it
still, because I see in it nothing that requires inter-
pretation ( I am trying to sound immodest, not mod-
est). But, you will protest, stylistic questions in my
music are not conclusively indicated by the notation;
my style requires interpretation. This is true and it is
also why I regard my recordings as indispensable
supplements to the printed music. But that isn't the
kind of "interpretation" my critics mean. What they
would like to know is whether the bass clarinet re-
peated notes at the end of the first movement of my
Symphony in Three Movements might be interpreted
as "laughter." Let us suppose I agree that it is meant
to be "laughter"; what difference could this make to
the performer? Notes are still intangible. They are
not symbols but signs.

The stylistic performance problem in my music is
one of articulation and rhythmic diction. Nuance

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depends on these. Articulation is mainly separation,
and I can give no better example of what I mean by
it than to refer the reader to W. B. Yeats's recording
of three of his poems. Yeats pauses at the end of each
line, he dwells a precise time on and in between each
word— one could as easily notate his verses in musical
rhythm as scan them in poetic meters.

For fifty years I have endeavored to teach musi-
cians to play

ST t* %/ +/ +/ instead of *p

in certain cases, depending on the style. I have also
labored to teach them to accent syncopated notes
and to phrase before them in order to do so. ( German
orchestras are as unable to do this, so far, as the
Japanese are unable to pronounce "L". ) In the per-
formance of my music, simple questions like this con-
sume half of my rehearsals: when will musicians learn
to abandon the tied-into note, to lift from it, and not
to rush the sixteenth notes afterwards? These are ele-
mentary things, but solfeggio is still at an elementary
level. And why should solfeggio be taught, when it
is taught, as a thing apart from style? Isn't this why
Mozart concertos are still played as though they
were Tchaikovsky concertos?

The chief performance problem of new music is
rhythmic. For example, a piece like Dallapiccola's
Cinque Canti contains no interval problems of instru-
mental technique (its cross shapes in the manner of
George Herbert are for the eye and present no aural
problems; one does not hear musically shaped
crosses). The difficulties are entirely rhythmic, and

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the average musician has to learn such a piece bar
by bar. He has not got beyond Le Sacre du Printemps,
if he has got that far. He cannot play simple triplets,
much less subdivisions of them. Difficult new music
must be studied in schools, even if only as exercises
in reading.

Myself as a conductor? Well, reviewers have cer-
tainly resisted me in that capacity for forty years, in
spite of my recordings, in spite of my special quali-
fications for knowing what the composer wants, and
my perhaps one thousand times greater experience
conducting my music than anyone else. Last year
Time called my San Marco performance of my
Canticum Sacrum "Murder in the Cathedral." Now
I don't mind my music going on trial, for if I'm to
keep my position as a promising young composer I
must accept that; but how could Time or anybody
know whether I ably conducted a work I alone knew?
( In London, shortly after the Time episode, I was at
tea one day with Mr. Eliot, being tweaked by a
story of his, when my wife asked that kindest, wisest,
and gentlest of men did he know what he had in
common with me. Mr. Eliot examined his nose; he
regarded me and then reflected on himself— tall,
hunched, and with an American gait; he pondered the
possible communalities of our arts. When my wife
said "Murder in the Cathedral," the great poet was
so disconcerted he made me feel he would rather not
have written this opus theatricum than have its title
loaned to insult me. )

R.C. Do you agree that perhaps the composer should try
to notate "style" more precisely? For example, in the
finale of your Octuor, the bassoons play eighth notes

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with dots; wouldn't it have been more exact to write
sixteenth notes followed by rests?
I.S. I do not believe that it is possible to convey a com-
plete or lasting conception of style purely by notation.
Some elements must always be transmitted by the
performer, bless him. In the case of the Octuor, for
example, if I had written sixteenth notes, the problem
of their length, whether they should be cut off on or
before the rests would be substituted for the original
problem, and imagine reading all those flags I

R.C. Have you noticed any influence of electronic tech-
nique on the compositions by the new serial com-
posers?

I.S. Yes, in several ways; and the electronic technique
of certain composers interests me far more in their
"live" compositions than in their electronic ones. To
mention only one influence, electronic music has made
composers more aware of range problems (in elec-
tronic music, after all, an octave higher does mean
twice as fast). But here again, Webern was ahead
in realizing that the same material, if it is to be worked
out on equal levels, must be limited to four or five
octaves (Webern extended beyond that only for im-
portant outlines of the form). But electronic music
has influenced rhythm (for example, that curious
sound which trails off into slower and slower dots),
articulation, and many items of texture, dynamics,
etc.

R.C. Which of your recorded performances do you prefer;
which do you consider definitive?

I.S. I cannot evaluate my records for the reason that I am
always too busy with new works to have time to
listen to them. However, a composer is not as easily

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satisfied with recordings of his works as a performer
is satisfied for him, in his name, and this is true even
when the composer and the performer are the same
person. The composer fears that errors will become
authentic copy and that one possible performance,
one set of variables will be accepted as the only one.
First recordings are standard-setting and we are too
quickly accustomed to them. But to the composer-
conductor the advantage of being able to anticipate
performances of his new works with his own record-
ings outweighs all complaints. For one thing, the
danger of the middle musician is reduced. For an-
other, the time lag in disseminating new music has
been cut from a generation or two to six months or a
year. If a work like he Marteau sans Maitre had
been written before the present era of recording it
would have reached young musicians outside of the
principal cities only years later. As it is, this same
Marteau, considered so difficult to perform a few
years ago, is now within the technique of many
players, thanks to their being taught by record.

But the public is still too little aware that the word
"performance" applied to recording is often extremely
euphemistic. Instead of 'performing" a piece, the
recording artist "breaks it down." He records accord-
ing to the size (cost) of the orchestra. Thus Haydn's
Farewell Symphony would be recorded from the be-
ginning to the end in order; but Bolero would be done
backwards, so to speak, if it were sectionally divisible.
Another problem is that the orchestra is seated ac-
cording to the acoustical arrangement required by
the engineering. This means that the orchestra does
not always sound like an orchestra to the orchestra.

I still prefer productions to reproductions. (No

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photograph matches the colors of the original, nor
is any phonographed sound the same as live sound;
and we know from experience that in five years new
processes and equipment will make us despise what
we now accept as good enough imitations.) But the
reproduced repertoire is so much greater than the
produced, concerts are no longer any competition at
all.

140

MUSIC AND THE CHURCH

R.C. Your Mass, Canticum Sacrum, and Threni are the
strongest challenges in two hundred years to the de-
cline of the Church as a musical institution.

I.S. I wish they were effective challenges. I had hoped my
Mass would be used liturgically, but I have no such
aspiration for the Threni, which is why I call it, not
Tenebrae Service but Lamentations. Whether or not
the Church was the wisest patron— though I think
it was; we commit fewer musical sins in church— it
was rich in musical forms. How much poorer we are
without the sacred musical services, without the
Masses, the Passions, the round-the-calendar cantatas
of the Protestants, the motets and sacred concerts,
and vespers and so many others. These are not merely
defunct forms but parts of the musical spirit in disuse.
The Church knew what the Psalmist knew: music
praises God. Music is as well or better able to praise
Him than the building of the church and all its
decoration; it is the Church's greatest ornament.
Glory, glory, glory; the music of Orlando Lasso's
motet praises God, and this particular "glory" does
not exist in secular music. And not only glory— though
I think of it first because the glory of the Laudate,
the joy of the Doxology, are all but extinct— but prayer
and penitence and many others cannot be secular-
ized. The spirit disappears with the form. I am not
comparing "emotional range" or "variety" in sacred
and secular music. The music of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries— it is all secular— is "expressively"

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and "emotionally" beyond anything in the music of
the earlier centuries: the Angst in Lulu, for instance-
gory, gory, gory— or the tension, the perpetuation of
the moment of epitasis, in Schoenberg's music. I say
simply that, without the Church, "left to our own
devices," we are poorer by many musical forms.

When I call the nineteenth century "secular" I
mean by it to distinguish between religious-religious
music and secular-religious music. The latter is in-
spired by humanity in general, by art, by Vber-
mensch, by goodness, and by goodness knows what.
Religious music without religion is almost always vul-
gar. It can also be dull. There is dull church music
from Hucbald to Haydn, but not vulgar church mu-
sic. ( Of course there is vulgar church music now, but
it is not really of or for the Church. ) I hope, too, that
my sacred music is a protest against the Platonic
tradition, which has been the Church's tradition
through Plotinus and Erigena, of music as antimoral.
Of course Lucifer had music. Ezekiel refers to his
"tabrets and pipes" and Isaiah to the "noise of his
viols." But Lucifer took his music with him from
Paradise, and even in Hell, as Bosch shows, music is
able to represent Paradise and become the "bride of
the cosmos."

"It has been corrupted by musicians," is the
Church's answer, the Church, whose musical history
is a series of attacks against polyphony, the true mu-
sical expression of Western Christendom, until music
retires from it in the eighteenth century or confounds
it with the theater. The corrupting musicians Bosch
means are probably Josquin and Okeghem, the cor-
rupting artifacts the polyphonic marvels of Josquin,
Ockeghem, Compere, Brumel.

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R.C. Must one be a believer to compose in these forms?

LS. Certainly, and not merely a believer in "symbolic
figures," but in the Person of the Lord, the Person of
the Devil, and the Miracles of the Church.

M3

THE YOUNGER GENERATION

R.C. Of your works, the young avant-garde admire Le Sacre
du Printemps, the Three Japanese Lyrics, various of
the Russian songs, Renard, and the Symphonies of
Wind Instruments. They react strongly against your
so-called neoclassic music, however ( Apollo, the piano
Concerto, Jeu de Cartes, etc.), and though they af-
firm your more recent music they complain that
triadic harmonies and tonic cadences are solecisms
in the backward direction of the tonal system. What
do you say to all this?

I.S. Let me answer the latter complaint first: my recent
works are composed in the— my— tonal system. These
composers are more concerned with direction than
with realistic judgments of music. This is as it should
be. But in any case they could not have followed the
twenty years of their immediate forebears, they had
to find new antecedents. A change in direction does
not mean that the out-of -influence is worthless, how-
ever. In science, where each new scientific truth cor-
rects some prior truth, it does sometimes mean that.
But in music advance is only in the sense of develop-
ing the instrument of the language— we are able to
do new things in rhythm, in sound, in structure. We
claim greater concentration in certain ways and there-
fore contend that we have evolved, in this one sense,
progressively. But a step in this evolution does not
cancel the one before. Mondrian's series of trees can
be seen as a study of progress from the more "re-
semblant" to the more abstract; but no one would be
so silly as to call any of the trees more or less beautiful

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than any other for the reason that it is more or less
abstract. If my music from Apollo and Oedipus to
The Rake's Progress did not continue to explore in
the direction that interests the younger generation
today, these pieces will nonetheless continue to exist.
Every age is an historical unity. It may never appear
as anything but either/or to its partisan contempo-
raries, of course, but semblance is gradual, and in
time either and or come to be components of the
same thing. For instance, "neoclassic" now begins
to apply to all of the between-the-war composers
( not that notion of the neoclassic composer as some-
one who rifles his predecessors and each other and
then arranges the theft in a new "style") . The music of
Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern in the twenties was
considered extremely iconoclastic at that time but
the composers now appear to have used musical form
as I did, "historically/' My use of it was overt, how-
ever, and theirs elaborately disguised. ( Take, for ex-
ample, the Rondo of Webern's Trio; the music is won-
derfully interesting but no one hears it as a Rondo. )
We all explored and discovered new music in the
twenties, of course, but we attached it to the very
tradition we were so busily outgrowing a decade
before.

R.C. What music delights you most today?

7.S. I play the English virginalists with never-failing de-
light. I also play Couperin, Bach cantatas too numer-
ous to distinguish, Italian madrigals even more numer-
ous, Schutz sinfoniae sacrae pieces, and masses by
Josquin, Ockeghem, Obrecht, and others. Haydn
quartets and symphonies, Beethoven quartets, sona-
tas, and especially symphonies like the Second,
Fourth, and Eighth, are sometimes wholly fresh and

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Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

delightful to me. Of the music of this century I am still
most attracted by two periods of Webern: the later in-
strumental works, and the songs he wrote after the
first twelve opus numbers and before the Trio— music
which escaped the danger of the too great preciosity
of the earlier pieces and which is perhaps the richest
Webern ever wrote. I do not say that the late cantatas
are a decline— quite the contrary— but their sentiment
is alien to me, and I prefer the instrumental works.
People who do not share my feeling for this music
will wonder at my attitude. So I explain: Webern is
for me the juste de la musique, and I do not hesitate
to shelter myself by the beneficent protection of his
not yet canonized art.

R.C. What piece of music has most attracted you from a
composer of the younger generation?

I.S. Le Marteau sans Maitre, by Pierre Boulez. The ordi-
nary musician's trouble in judging composers like
Boulez and the young German Stockhausen is that
he doesn't see their roots. These composers have
sprung full-grown. With Webern, for example, we
trace his origins back to the musical traditions of
the nineteenth and earlier centuries. But the ordi-
nary musician is not aware of Webern. He asks ques-
tions like, "What sort of music would Boulez and
Stockhausen write if they were asked to write tonal
music?" It will be a considerable time before the
value of Le Marteau sans Maitre is recognized. Mean-
while I shall not explain my admiration for it but
adapt Gertrude Stein's answer when asked why she
liked Picasso's paintings: "I like to look at them." I
like to listen to Boulez.

R.C. What do you actually "hear" vertically in music such

146

About Music Today

as Boulez's Deux Improvisations sur MallarmS or he
Marteau sans Maitre?
I.S. "Hear" is a very complicated word. In a purely acous-
tical sense I hear everything played or sounded. In
another sense, too, I am aware of everything played.
But you mean, really, what tonal relationships am I
conscious of, what does my ear analyze, and does it
filter the pitches of all the individual notes? Your
question implies that you still seek to relate the notes
tonally; that you are looking for a "key" that will
enable you to do so ( like Hardy's Jude, who imagined
that Greek was only a different pronunciation of
English). However, all that the ear can be aware of
in this sense is density (nobody under thirty— and
only rare antediluvians like myself over thirty— uses
the word "harmony" any more but only "density").
And density has become a strict serial matter, an
element for variation and permutation like any other;
according to one's system one gets from two to twelve
notes in the vertical aggregation. ( Is this mathemati-
cal? Of course it is, but the composer composes the
mathematics. ) All of this goes back to Webern, who
understood the whole problem of variable densities
(a fact so remarkable that I wonder if even Webern
knew who Webern was). But the question of har-
monic hearing is an older one, of course. Every or-
dinary listener (if there is any such extraordinary
creature) has been troubled by harmonic hearing in
the music of the Vienna school from circa 1909— in
Erwartung, for example. He hears all of the notes
acoustically but cannot analyze their harmonic struc-
ture. The reason is, of course, that this music isn't
harmonic in the same way. (In the case of the

147

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

Erwartung recording there is another reason too; the
vocal part is sung off pitch most of the time. )

Do I hear the chord structure of these nonharmonic-
bass chords? It is difficult to say exactly what I do
hear. For one thing it is a question of practice (while
perhaps not entirely a question of practice). But
whatever the limits of hearing and awareness are, I
shouldn't like to have to define them. We already
hear a great deal more in the harmony of these non-
tonal-system harmonic pieces. For example, I now
hear the whole first movement of Weberns Symphony
tonally (not just the famous C-minor place), and
melodically I think everyone hears it more nearly
tonally now than twenty years ago. Also, young people
born to this music are able to hear more of it than we
are.

The Boulez music? Parts of the Marteau are not dif-
ficult to hear in toto; the "bourreaux de solitude," for
instance, which resembles the first movement of the
Webern Symphony. With a piece like "apres l'artisanat
f urieux," however, one follows the line of only a single
instrument and is content to be "aware of" the others.
Perhaps later the second line and the third will be
familiar, but one mustn't try to hear them in the
tonal-harmonic sense. What is "aware of?" Instru-
mentalists often ask that question: "If we leave out
such and such bits, who will know?" The answer is
that one does know. Many people today are too ready
to condemn a composer for "not being able to hear
what he has written." In fact, if he is a real composer,
he always does hear, at least by calculation, every-
thing he writes. Tallis calculated the forty parts of
his Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui, he did not
hear them; and even in twelve-part polyphony such

148

About Music Today

as Orlando's, vertically we hear only four-part music.
I even wonder if in complicated Renaissance polyph-
ony the singers knew where they were in relation
to each other— which shows how good their rhythmic
training must have been ( to maintain such independ-
ence ) .

R.C. How do you understand Anton Webern's remark:
"Don't write music entirely by ears. Your ears will
always guide you all right, but you must know why."

I.S. Webern was not satisfied with the— from one point
of view— passive act of hearing: his music requires
that the hearer, whether composer or listener, make
cognizant relations of what he hears: "You must know
why." It obliges the hearer to become a listener,
summons him to active relations with music.

149

THE FUTURE OF MUSIC

R.C. Young composers are exploring dynamics; what kind
of new use of them may we expect?

LS. An example of the kind of dynamic use we might
anticipate is in Stockhausen's Zeitmasse. In that piece,
at bar 187, a chord is sustained in all five instruments,
but the intensities of the individual instruments con-
tinue to change throughout the duration of the chord:
the oboe begins ppp and makes a short crescendo
to p at the end: the flute diminuendos slowly from
p, then crescendos a little more quickly to p, where it
remains through the last third of the bar; the English
horn crescendos slowly, then more quickly, from ppp
to mp, and diminuendos symmetrically; the clarinet
sustains p, then slowly diminuendos from it.

Such dynamic exploitation is not new, of course—
a serial use of dynamics as well as of articulation,
a related subject and just as important, is already
clearly indicated in Webern's Concerto for Nine
Instruments— but I think electronic instruments, and
especially electronic control might carry it much far-
ther. I myself employ dynamics for various purposes
and in various ways, but always to emphasize and
articulate musical ideas: I have never regarded them
as exploitable in themselves. In places such as the
tenor ricercare in my Cantata I ignore volume almost
altogether. Perhaps my experience as a performer
has persuaded me that circumstances are so differ-
ent as to require every score to be re-marked for
every performance. However, a general scale of dy-

150

About Music Today

namic relationships—there are no absolute dynam-
ics—must be clear in the performers mind.

The inflections of a constantly changing dynamic
register are alien to my music. I do not breathe in
ritardandos or accelerandos, diminuendos or cre-
scendos, in every phrase. And infinitely subtle gradu-
ations—pianissimi at the limits of audibility and be-
yond—are suspect to me. My musical structure does
not depend on dynamics— though my "expression"
employs them. I stand on this point in contrast to
Webern.

R.C. Will you make any prediction about the "music of the
future ?w

I.S. There may be add-a-part electronic sonatas, of course,
and precomposed symphonies ("Symphonies for the
Imagination"— you buy a tone row, complete with
slide rules for duration, pitch, timbre, rhythm, and
calculus tables to chart what happens in bar 12 or
73 or 200 ) , and certainly all music will be mood-classi-
fied (kaleidoscopic montages for contortuplicate per-
sonalities, simultaneous concerts binaurally disaligned
to soothe both men in the schizophrenic, etc.), but
mostly it will very much resemble "the music of the
present": for the man in the satellite— super-hi-fi
Rachmaninov.

R.C. Do you think it likely that the masterpiece of the
next decade will be composed in serial technique?

I.S. Nothing is likely about masterpieces, least of all
whether there will be any. Nevertheless, a master-
piece is more likely to happen to the composer with
the most highly developed language. This language
is serial at present, and though our contemporary
development of it could be tangential to an evolution

151

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

we do not yet see, for us this doesn't matter. Its
resources have enlarged the present language and
changed our perspective in it. Developments in lan-
guage are not easily abandoned, and the composer
who fails to take account of them may lose the main-
stream. Masterpieces aside, it seems to me the new
music will be serial.

!5*

ADVICE TO YOUNG COMPOSERS

R.C. Will you offer any cautions to young composers?

I.S. A composer is or isn't; he cannot learn to acquire the
gift that makes him one, and whether he has it or
not, in either case, he will not need anything I can
tell him. The composer will know that he is one if
composition creates exact appetites in him and if in
satisfying them he is aware of their exact limits. Simi-
larly, he will know he is not one if he has only a
"desire to compose'' or "wish to express himself in
music." These appetites determine weight and size.
They are more than manifestations of personality,
are in fact indispensable human measurements. In
much new music, however, we do not feel these di-
mensions, which is why it seems to "flee music," to
touch it and rush away, like the mujik who, when
asked what he would do if he was made Tsar, said, "I
would steal one hundred roubles and run as fast as I
can."

I would warn young composers too, Americans
especially, against university teaching. However pleas-
ant and profitable to teach counterpoint at a rich
American Gymnasium like Smith or Vassar, I am
not sure that that is the right background for a
composer. The numerous young people on university
faculties who write music and who fail to develop
into composers cannot blame their university careers,
of course, and there is no pattern for the real composer,
anyway. The point is, however, that teaching is aca-
demic (Webster: "Literary . . . rather than technical
or professional . . . Conforming to . . . rules . . .

153

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

conventional . . . Theoretical and not expected to
produce ... a practical result"), which means that
it may not be the right contrast for a composer's
noncomposing time. The real composer thinks about
his work the whole time; he is not always conscious of
this but he is aware of it later, when he suddenly
knows what he will do.

R.C. Do you allow that some of the new "experimental"
composers might be going "too far?"

I.S. "Experiment" means something in the sciences; it
means nothing at all in musical composition. No good
musical composition could be merely "experimental";
it is music or it isn't. It must be heard and judged
like any other. A successful "experiment" in musical
composition would be as great a failure as an un-
successful one, if it were no more than an experiment.
But in your question, the question that interests me
is the one which implies the drawing of lines:
"Thus far and no farther; beyond this point music
cannot go." I suppose psychology has studied the
effects of various types of challenges on various groups
and I suppose it knows what are normal responses
and when they occur— in this case, when one begins
to seek defense from new ideas and to rationalize
them away. I have no information about this. But, I
have all around me the spectacle of composers who,
after their generation has had its decade of influence
and fashion, seal themselves off from further develop-
ment and from the next generation. (As I say this,
exceptions come to mind— Krenek, for instance.) Of
course, it requires greater effort to learn from one's
juniors, and their manners are not invariably good.
But when you are seventy-five and your generation
has overlapped with four younger ones, it behooves

154

About Music Today

you not to decide in advance "how far composers
can go," but to try to discover whatever new thing
it is makes the new generation new.

The very people who have done the breaking
through are themselves often the first to try to put a
scab on their achievement. What fear tells them to
cry halt? What security do they seek, and how can
it be secure if it is limited? How can they forget
that they once fought against what they have be-
come?

155

INDEX

(S) Stands for Stravinsky

Abeilles, Les (S), 40-41
Agon (S), 23, 134
Aleko (ballet music by Tchai-
kovsky), 114
Alexander III, Tsar, 92-93
Altenberg Lieder (Berg), 30
Ansermet, Ernest, 58
Apollo (S), 15, 17, 23, 115, 144,

145
Apologie de la Danse (de

Lauze), 19
Argutinsky, Prince Vladimir, 116
Ariadne auf Naxos (Strauss),

83

Auberjonois, Ren6, 63, 64
Auden, W. H., 15, 35, 86, 87
Augenlicht, Das (Webern), 133
Augures Printanidres, Les (Sacre
du Printemps, S), 47

Bach, J. S., 25, 30-31, 78, 135,

145
Bakst, 96, 108-9, n°> m
Balakirev, 38, 43, 46
Balla, 103, 104, 105
Balthus, 112

Balustrade (ballet, S), 114
Barber of Seville (reduction for

two pianos, Schoenberg), 77
Bartok, 82, 127
Bauchant, Andre, 115
Beethoven, 27-28, 39, 99, 119,

145-46
Benois, 70, 107, 109-10
Berard, Christian, 115

Berg, 30, 77, 79-82, 127, 128,

134, 145
Berlioz, 27, 28
Berman, Eugene, 25, 109
Bessel (publisher), 66
Blanche, J.-E., 113
Bluebird, The (Maeterlinck),

41
Blue Facade (Mondrian), 16
Boccioni, 103, 105
Bocklin, Arnold, 84
Bohdme, La (Puccini), 68
Bolero (Ravel), 139
Bonnard, 96
Boris Godunov (Moussorgsky),

55
Borodin, 43

Bosch, Hieronymus, 142
Bosset, Vera de, 114; see also

Stravinsky
Boulez, Pierre, 23, 31-32, 146,

147, 148
Boutique Fantasque, La (ballet,

Rossini-Respighi), 112
Brahms, 27, 43-44, 78
Brancusi, 102, 115
Braque, 115
Brumel, Antoine, 142
Busoni, 99, 121-22

Cage, The (ballet, S), 40
Caldara, 84-85
Canova, 102
Cantata (S), 150
Canticum Sacrum (S), 22, 36,
137, 141

156

Index

Capriccio (S), 77

Carra, Carlo, 103, 105

Carter, Elliott, 124

Casella, Alfredo, 38, 69 n.

Chagall, 114-15

Chaliapin, 66-67

Chant du Rossignol, Le (S),
106; see also Nightingale, The

Chinese March, The (in Night-
ingale), 72 n.

Chinese Pirates, The (Milan
puppet theater), 104-5

Chopin, 29, 30

Cimarosa, 84

Cinque Canti (Dallapiccola),

136-37
Cipriano da Rore, 85
Claudel, 41
Cocteau, 61 n., 96 n., 98, 108,

115

Cohen (philosopher), 100
Compere, Loyset, 142
Concerto for Nine Instruments

(Webern), 123, 150
Cooper, Gary, 101
Coup de Des, Un (Mallarm6),

31-32
Couperin, Frangois, 145
Craft, Robert, 89
Croce, Giovanni, 85
Cui, Cesar, 43, 46

Dallapiccola, 136

D'Annunzio, 94-95

Danse Sacrale (Sacre du Prin-

temps, S), 19, 21
Dante, 77

Daphnis et Chloe, 72
Dargomizhsky, 46
David project (Cocteau and S),

61 n.

Debussy, 31, 39, 5o~59> 60, 63,

65, 75, 131
Debussy, Emma-Claude, 52 n.,

56,59
Delage, Maurice, 69, 71
Delauney, Robert, 113
Derain, 111-12
Deux Improvisations sur Mal-

larme (Boulez), 147
Diaghilev, 47, 48, 55, 61 n., 66,

68, 76, 83, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98,

103, 105, 106, 107, 108,

110-11, 112, 113, 114, 115,

116, 118, 129
Diphonas (of Threni, S), 18
Dithyrambe (of Duo Concer-

tant, S), 20
Doctor and the Devils, The

(Dylan Thomas), 86
Doktor Faust (Busoni), 99
Donatello, 102
Donna, se mancidete (Gesu-

aldo),34
Doret, Gustave, 58
Dostoievsky, 93
Duke Hercules Mass (Josquin),

23
Duo Concertant, 19, 20

Eight Symphony (Beethoven),

28, 145
Einstein, Albert, 84
Elegias (of Threni, S), 18
Eliot, T. S., 77, 137
Emperor Quartet (Haydn), 133
En blanc et noir (Debussy),

52 n.
Errazuriz, Eugenia, 117
Erwartung (Schoenberg), 147-

48

157

Index

Falstaff (Verdi), 83

Farewell Symphony (Haydn),

139

Faune et Bergdre (S), 26 n., 40

Fils Prodigue, Le (ballet, Proko-
fiev), 115

Firebird, The (S), 41, 65, 76,
107-8, 113, 115

Fireworks (S), 103

Five Pieces for Orchestra
(Schoenberg), 79

Flight of the Bumble Bee (Rim-
sky-Korsakov), 40, 41 n.

Fontanelli, Count Alfonso, 34

Franck, Cesar, 79

Fritsch, Von (author of Bees,
their Chemical Sense and Lan-
guage), 40

Fiirstner, Adolph, 115

Gabrieli, Giovanni, 85

Galuppi, 84

Gesang der Jiinglinge (Stock-
hausen), 125

Gesualdo, 33-34

Giacometti, 101-2

Gilbert and Sullivan, 35

Glazunov, 37-38, 46

Gleizes, Albert, 113

Glinka, 45-46

Gloria Patri (from Monteverdi's
Vespers), 21

Gliickliche Hand, Die (Schoen-
berg), 78

Godebski family, 71

Goethe, 58-59

Gogol, 68

Goldoni, 85

Golovine, 107

Golubev, Mme., 94

Goncharova (wife of Larionov),

111
Gromyko, Andrei, 97
Gruyypen (Stockhausen), 123
Guillaume, Georges, 96 n.

Handel, 78
Hardy, Thomas, 147
Hauptmann, Gerhardt, 112
Haydn, 16, 133, 139, 142, 145
Heard, Gerald, 40
Heidegger, 100
Herbert, George, 136
Herzgewachse (Schoenberg), 79
Histoire du Soldat, V (S), 13,

63 n., 64 n., 99, 128
Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 84
Hotson, Leslie, 34
Houdon, 102
Hucbald, 142
Husserl, Edmund, 100

Ibsen, 93, 94

Ielatchich, Alexander, 44

Is Another World Watching?

(Heard), 40
Islamey (Balakirev), 38

Jacob, Max, 96 n.

Jacob's Ladder (Schoenberg),

78

Jawlensky, Alexis, 112
Jeu de Cartes (S), 144
Jeux (Debussy), 53
Josquin, 18, 23, 142, 145

Kafka, 78
Kahn, Otto, 111

Kammerkonzert (Berg), 80, 134
Kandinsky, 99-100

158

Index

Khovanshchina (S and Ravel),

66-67
Kireievsky, 48-49
Klee, Paul, 31, 75, 99, 102
Koussevitzky, 56, 57
Krenek, 154

Laloy, Louis, 52

Lamentations, see Threni

Larionov, 110, 111, 114

Lassus, 141

Laudate Pueri (from Monte-
verdi's Vespers), 21

Laurencin, Marie, 115

Lauze, de, 19

Lawrence, D. H., 126

Lee, Vernon, 84

Legend of Joseph (ballet, R.
Strauss), 83, 116

Leger, 113-14

Liapunov, 46

Liebermann, Max, 112-13

Life for the Tsar, A (Glinka),

37
Lipnitsky, 114
Liszt, 15, 44, 46
Livre de Mallarme, Le (Sche-

rer), 32
Loewe, 78
Lulu (Berg), 30, 80, 142

Maeterlinck, 40-41
Mahler, 38-39, 80, 81, 84
Malipiero, G. F., 95
Mallarme, 31-32
Manet, 116

Manfred (Tchaikovsky), 39
Marcello, Benedetto, 84
Mariinsky Theater, St. Peters-
burg, 37
Marinetti, 103, 104, 105

Marriage of Figaro, The (Mo-
zart), 93

Marteau sans Maitre, Le (Bou-
lez), 23, 122, 139, 146, 147,
148

Mass (S), 36, 141

Massine, 117

Matisse, 106-7

Mavra (S), 23, 98, 108, 111

Mayakovsky, 97-98

Mendelssohn, 41 n.

Mersenne, Mavin, 19

Micheaux, Henri, 24

Mir Isskoustva, 107, 112

Mitusov, S. N., 106

Modern Psalms (Schoenberg),

78

Modigliani, 96

Mondrian, 16, 144-45

Monet, 97

Monn, G. M. and J. M., 78

Monteux, 47

Monteverdi, 21, 85

Moses und Aron (Schoenberg),

78
Moussorgsky, 43, 44-45, 66, 67
Mozart, 84, 136
Murat, Princess Violette, 99
Mussolini, 94-95

Nabokov, Nicolas, 114
Napravnik, E. F., 37
Nicolson, Sir Harold, 94
Nightingale, The (S), 60, 61,

62, 63, 69, 72, 94, 106
Nijinsky, 47-48, 53, 61 n., 110
Nikisch, 38
Nikolsky, 45
Noces, Les (S), 48-49, 73, 110-

11, 115, 132
Nocturnes (Debussy), 58

159

Index

Notebooks (von Hofmannsthal),

84

Nouvelle Revue Frangaise, La,

60, 63-64
Nuages gris (Liszt), 15

Obrecht, 85, 145

Ockeghem, 142, 145

Octuor (S), 137-38

Ode to Napoleon (Schoenberg),

79
Oedipus Rex (S), 17, 36, 84,

111, 145
Oeil, V (periodical), 71 n.
Orpheus (S), 17
Orsini, 34

Ortega y Gasset, 17, 100-1
Othello (Verdi), 83

Parsifal (Wagner), 51

Pergolesi, 85

Persephone (S), 17, 21

Petit Concert (from L'Histoire

du Soldat, S ) , 13
Petroushka (S), 50, 51, 52, 62,

64, 76, 81, 95, 109, 110, 112
Piano Concerto (S), 18, 23, 144
Piano Piece No. XI (Stock-

hausen), 126
Piano Quartet, G-minor

(Brahms), 27
Piano Sonata (S), 23
Picasso, 96 n., 107, 109, 116-18,

146; Olga, 117
Pierne, G., 108
Pierrot Lunaire (Schoenberg),

31, 76, 79, 128
Pigalle, 102

Poetics of Music (S), 83
Polignac, Princess E. de, 110,

111

Powell, Michael, 86
Pratella, F. B., 104
Prince Igor (Borodin), 105
Prokofiev, 97
Proust, 98-99

Pulcinella (S), 85, 116, 118
Purcell, 36
Pushkin, 48, 49, 93
Puvis de Chavannes, 106

Quartet (Schoenberg, 1897), yy

Rachmaninov, 42-43, 151
Radiguet, Raymond, 98
Ragtime (S), 117
Rakes Progress, The (S), 87,

145
Ramuz, C. F., 64, 99
Ravel, 27, 29, 61 n., 66-73;

Edouard (R.'s brother), 70,

71
Reger, Max, 38, 79
Renard (S), 36, 98

114, 115, 144
Richter, Hans, 38
Rigoletto (Verdi), 83
Rimsky-Korsakov, 26 n..

28 n., 38, 39-40, 41 n

44-45, 46, 66, 67
Riviere, Jacques, 60-65
Rodin, 95-96, 102
Roerich, Nicolas, 105-6, 108
Rogers, Shorty, 131-32
Roi des Etoiles, Le (S), 54
Romeo and Juliet (Tchaikov

sky), 26 n.
Rouault, 115
Russolo, 103, 104

110, 111.

27,
43,

160

Sacre du Printemps, Le (S), 19,
N47-48, 50, 52-53, 55 n., 60,

Index

64, 67, 69, 105-6, 109, 123,

137, 144
Satie, 67, 74-75
Scarlatti, 85
Scheler, 100

Scherchen, Hermann, 76, 99
Scherer, Jacques, 32 n.
Scherzo (of Eighth Symphony,

Beethoven), 28
Scherzo Fantastique (S), 40-

42 n.
Schmitt, Florent, 69 n., 71
Schoeller, 96 n.
Schoenberg, Arnold, 23, 27, 29,

31, 76-79, 93, 1^7, 128, 133,

142, 145
Schubert, 39
Schumann, 25
Schiitz, 145
Scriabin, 39-40
Set disposto (Gesualdo), 34
Septet (S), 22
Seraphita (Schoenberg), 79
Serenade (Schoenberg), 79, 128
Serov, A. N., 108
Sert, J. M. and Misia, 71 n.,

115-16
Seurat, 17

Shestakova, Ludmilla, 45-46
Sibelius, 127

Slauzol, la Marquise de, 100
Societe de la Musique Actuelle,

56

Society for Private Performances

(Vienna), yy
Socrate (Satie), 74-75
Some People (Nicolson), 94
Spectre de la Rose, he (ballet

music by Weber), 110
Spem in Alium Nunquam Habui

(Tallis), 148

Stassov, 28 n.

Stein, Gertrude, 146

Stendhal, 25

Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 122-23,
125, 126, 146, 150

Strauss, Richard, 39, 83-84, 115,
127

Stravinsky, Mme. Catherine,
Stravinsky's first wife, 69-70,
89 (and various refs. in let-
ters), see also Bosset, Vera de
(Stravinsky's second wife);
Goury, 93-94; Soulima, 77;
Theodore, 115

Studies of the Eighteenth Cen-
tury in Italy (Vernon Lee),

84

Surge Aquilo (from Canticum
Sacrum, S), 133

Survage, 111

Sylphides, Les (Ballet music),
29-30, 109

Symphonies of Wind Instru-
ments (S), 144

Symphony (Webern), 148

Symphony in C (S), 19, 21

Symphony in E-flat (S), 26 n.,
40

Symphony in Three Movements
(S), 29, 135

Symphony of Psalms (S), 36

Szanto, 72

Tagebiicher (Klee), 31

Tallis, 19, 148

Tchaikovsky, 26 n., 39, 41 n.,

43, 130, 136
Tchelichev, Pavel, 114
Tenischev, Princess, 105
Thomas, Dylan, 86-91; Caitlin,

87,91

161

Index

Three Japanese Lyrics (S), 67,

69,144
Three Pieces for Orchestra, op.6

(Berg), 80-81
Threni (S), 14, 18, 19, 30,

132 n. 141
Time (magazine), 137
Tintoretto, 16
Trio (Webern), 145, 146
Trois Podmes de MallarmS

(Ravel), 67, 69

Valery, Paul, 18

Valse, La (Ravel), 70 n.

Variations for Orchestra, op. 31
(Schoenberg), 29, 79

Verdi, 83

Vespers (Monteverdi), 21

Vie des Abeilles, La (Maeter-
linck), 40-41

Visage Nuptial, Le (Boulez),
78 n.

Vivaldi, 84

Vollard, 116

Von Heute auf Morgen (Schoen-
berg), 27
Vroubel, 107

Wagner, 26 n., 39, 44, 46, 83
Wallace, Vice-President, 106
Water Lilies (Monet), 97
Webern, 18, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81-
82, 123, 127, 128, 129, 133,
138, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149,

150, 151
Wilder, Thornton, 101
Willaert, 85
With Serov in Greece (Bakst),

108
Wozzeck (Berg), 80

Yeats, W. B., 87, 136

Zborovsky, 96 n.

Zeitmasse (Stockhausen), 123,

150
Ziloti, Alexander, 41 n.

162

Date Due

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Library Bureai

Cat. No. 1137

1

927.81St87c

MUSIC

3 5002 00397 0634

Stravinsky, Igor

Conversations with Igor Stravinsky

ML 410 .£932 A33
Stravinsky, Igor, 1882-1971

Conversations with Igor
Stravinsky

ML 410 . S932 A33
Stravinsky, Igor, 1682-1971

Conversations with Igor
Stravinsky